Seccession

Seccession is no longer even a nutty atavistic concept, given increasing recognition that the US South, along with the military, remain institutional bases for disseminating anti-public and incapacitation-security dispositions.

The Postwar Conservative Restoration & the Incapacitation of the Demos: Dutch-EU Contributions

Anderson, Perry. 2020. “The European Coup.” The London Review of Books, 17 December: 9-23.

The Anti-democratic Political Lineage behind the EU

1. Gabriel Naude‘ (1600-1653, France) is the conservative’s Machiavelli.

2. Counterrevolutionary Gentz (non-elite conservative theorist/advisor to)–>Prince Metternich (1773-1859, Austrian Empire diplomat from 1809-1848)–>domestic policing and repression of (national) political organizing (pathologized as “Europe-wide terrorism,” the Austrian Empire’s prelude to the 20th century Liberty v. Totalitarianism conservative theory dichotomy), conservative Restoration in Europe.

–>Frank Ankersmit (b. 1945)–>Luuk van Middelaar (b. 1973); EU coups and intelligence services incapacitating the citizenry (22-23).

The EU as governance by coup: Liberal Political Theory in the Netherlands

Both EU political theorist van Middelaar and his political philosophy mentor Ankersmit (University of Groningen, The Netherlands; Ankersmit family are textile capitalists) share: Dutch nationality; Anticommunist, pro-capitalist politics; politics as aesthetic work, producing sublimity, shocking and awing the public (19). Ankersmit theorized the coup as the elite human sublime (18). For this tradition, however, coups are not military putsches. Coups are secret, backroom plotting for technocrats (often a judiciary, but also officials, elected or appointed) to use seemingly mundane procedural decisionmaking to insert/assert field-changing, parameter-changing power claims. The cultural precondition for governance by this form of blitzkrieg, the coup, is that existing organizations, awestruck, simply faint and roll. Van Middelaar argues that the EU is a perfect example of a state built entirely on this kind of coup, or rather a succession of coups.

Van Middelaar is distinguished from his political theory mentor Ankersmit by van Middelaar’s more thorough-going elitist, anti-democratic politics (23). Ankersmit calls himself a conservative liberal. Where Ankersmit’s project was to craft an ex post facto Counterrevolutionary argument for how democracy emerges from anti-democracy, van Middelaar has no reason to reconcile anti-democracy to democracy. The ideal public for van Middelaar is a neutered onlooker of a spectacle, at best a Greek chorus, a response amplifying the political actors’ will (23). The enemy is a capacitated, participating citizenry, or what is today denounced as “populism” (23). The Hobbesian elitist assumption van Middelaar [Ankersmit?] forwards is that nonelite humans must be mystified, tricked, and herded, Wizard of Oz-fashion, because nonelites (alone) sin by abusing human reason [TBD]. This is the European Union model and the political conservatization the EU has sponsored.

Ankermittian Conservative-liberalism

Self-described conservative-liberal Ankersmit derives from Burke a concept of representing political issues that flatters the politician as an artist marketeer, aesthetically substituting notions for the interests and will of the people. Ankersmit clarifies that just as Rousseau was wrong about political representation as bearing a responsibility to reproduce the will of the demos, so we are wrong to imagine the Enlightenment as contributing to democracy. Instead Romanticism is the font of parliamentary political representation, the substitution of elite interpretation of interests and rights for the interests and rights of the demos (9). In the French conservative Restoration, Guizot established the proper techniques and doctrines required to govern with both entitled elites and revolutionaries in the territory. Clouded language is the tool. Parliamentary democracy emerged from Romantic aesthetic politics in the 19th century, and was perfected in the 20th century. The point of the 21st century is to “restore boundaries between the public and the private.” What does that mean?

Naude’: {TBD]

Le droit d’ingérence (created by the political philosopher Revel in 1979): The Right of Interference, supranational authorization for the violation of sovereignty. As Rousseau critiqued, What does right add to might? [TBD: One retort is that the Obama Presidency demonstrates that right grafted onto might is extra powerful.]

Bolkestein Directive: The Coup that was Not Dry Enough

In the early 2000s, Van Middelaar worked for the Dutch and EU politician and businessman Fritz Bolkestein, when Bolkestein held the powerful internal markets portfolio in the European Commission. Bolkestein’s work can be examined as a case, contra Ankersmit’s ideal, of coup over-reach. The existing institutions did not in this case faint and roll at the historic social, political, and economic counter-revolution that Bolkestein intended to stage through the coup of his EU Directive.

The Bolkestein Directive, or the EU’s Services in the Internal Market Directive, 2004-2006, was a coup that required all countries to lower their wage floor to the lowest pay in the EU (the pay floor of the newly-admitted Eastern European countries). I’m familiar with it because it threatened to fatally gut Sweden’s sovereignty, institutional landscape, and economy by forcing the social democracy to allow businesses to import and flood the labour market with low-wage, non-unionized, non-sovereign labour with few citizenship rights. The Bolkestein Directive was highly resisted throughout Western Europe, and it was converted (11) to prevent the catastrophe of bulk transferring European working class wages into capitalist and rentier assets (the limitless billionaire-and-serfs model that dominates today), and the catastrophe of stripping the European working class of the capacity to reproduce itself within the cost structure of advanced capitalist commodified life.

The Bolkestein Directive sought to reverse 100 years of post-feudal social democratic egaliberte achievements in Sweden and in other European countries. The Bolkestein Directive would have particularly devastated apex social democracy Sweden, because Sweden had invested for a century in building a high-quality labour market, including all the supporting institutions, such as accessible, high-quality research universities, and a highly-capacitated citizenry, at the expense of a vast public- and working-class subsidized field of low-quality, low-paying, low-profit businesses (a field the pandemic has shown to be utterly disposable) reproduced by public infrastructure poverty and vulnerable, desperate labor and war-propelled migration, the conservative (eg. Anglo-American imperial settler/permanent work colony) model.

Conservative political theory generally champions tail-wagging-the-dog governance; but the Bolkestein Directive was far more ostentatiously radical than the Ankersmit-Naude’ ideal of prim, under-the-radar frontstage technocratic tweaking fueled by ruthless backstage elite strategizing. It would have converted citizens into population–raw, exploitable, expropriable bare-life population; ignited racial capitalism and restored serfdom in Europe; and laid waste to a century of egaliberte infrastructure. This blonde ambition was even too disruptive and wasteful for early 21st century European capital. Melting down regional capacity is a strategy for empires to hold down upstarts, with the usual debt, warfare, and comprador bourgeoisie tools.

The Bolkestein Directive coup might be where van Middelaar’s Trumpian impatience for a pivot to conservative-triumphant spectacle politics undermined Ankersmit’s hybrid war-of-position, war-of-movement coup strategy. In conservative restoration, the US is advantaged by a strong, widely-institutionalized (in public infrastructure poverty, in the military and policing institutions) slaver culture; whereas continental Europe has a long tradition of very belligerent class conflict, externalizing slavery, that may make an EU pivot to Trumpian spectacle more difficult outside fascist subregions.

The catastrophic sacrifice of the social democratic countries would have overwhelmingly advantaged the UK in the EU, as the UK had long institutionalized the conservative imperial political-economic ideal, the permanent work colony attached to a global financial metropole. Insofar as it stoked British expectations, the Bolkestein Directive–over-ambitiously favoring the UK–may thus be considered responsible for Brexit. While British Euroskepticism started with Thatcher’s reconsideration, and was institutionalized in the 1990s, British public support for Brexit flared eight years after the Bolkestein Directive, in 2014, when anti-EU UKIP threatened the Conservative-Labour Parties’ rule. As a result, Conservatives introduced the Brexit vote in 2016.

How did the Netherlands come to be such a hotbed of conservative political theory today? Is it the effect of privileged low-country access to EU positions?

Background to this coup: TBD

Pandemic Policy Issues in Low-capacity Regions

To appreciate the intensive resource, logistics, and organization presuppositions of biosecurity lockdown, or carceral biosecurity, it is useful to review the strategy’s origins. They are in a bipartisan US defense intellectual collective including a couple members with MDs. The well they were tapping for the pandemic model is highly-complex military operations to lock down enemy cities.

You will notice biosecurity lockdown is unevenly applied in the US. This is because over that expanse, there is not uniform distribution of military-level resources, logistics, and organization capacity (try though Americans have). Nor is there in other low-capacity regions.

What would be required to treat some regions of the US like a military lockdown operation is what happens to the residents of Gaza, crippling incapacitation. Thus, when the US military contorted to apply biosecurity strategy to itself, the pandemic results were not successful. The social, economic, geographic distributions of capacity that are invoked in pandemic policy matter on many dimensions including health, and the pertinent variables in lockdown cannot be reduced to cooperation with professionals v. small business income.

Biosecurity is not the straight-forward, no-nonsense strategy of sheer altruism, will, and optimal results that its advocates paint. Let’s dig into what happens when the military operation of biosecurity mass lockdown is applied in low-capacity regions.

I define low-capacity regions as regions that are heavily constrained by, and to some degree systematically disorganized by, the geographical hierarchy of capitalist accumulation. While low-capacity regions may have expertise, and even institutions and resources, that could tailor demanding pandemic strategies to regional conditions, their capacity to identify and tap that expertise, those resources is very limited. Low-capacities regions are disconnected from their own appropriate expertise, and can only formulaically implement the often substantively-irrational, and deliberately- incapacitating military logic of quarantine.

I present a first example of glaringly-low regional organizing capacity, rendering military-grade mass lockdown an inefficient and counterproductive strategy: Canada has the OECD’s worst long-term care home COVID-19 results. The regional university in Manitoba has one of the country’s foremost experts on long-term care homes–but she is a female Sociologist. Despite strenuous efforts to contribute, she was excluded from COVID-19 policy strategizing and decisionmaking. Only belatedly did some medical doctors discover the systemic problems with long-term care homes, where they’ve been belatedly cited as local authorities. People in low capacity regions have no idea that most medical doctors are not researchers, or that research expertise is even needed in crisis; and a huge handicap in crises, they have absolutely no idea what Sociologists actually study and know * –particularly if the researcher presents as female. Such poor capacity to identify and source pertinent, quality knowledge means high-demand strategies like lockdown are very poorly executed.

In low-capacity Manitoba, for another example, in the first transmission wave through the ensuing summer, only one researcher, a Sociologist with an ecology background, attempted, repeatedly, to publicly flag the need for using the regional viral testing lab and enhancing its capacity to contribute to test and trace. That researcher’s efforts to stimulate organization of the region’s existing testing infrastructure was strenuously resisted and challenged by the male-regulated media network. As well, when that researcher interviewed regional health policy experts (a position requiring an MD by policy) and medical practitioners, she found that none had considered the option of organizing testing capacity throughout the first six months after the first March 12, 2020 lockdown–Though the province had its own viral testing lab. It simply was not in the medical profession’s interest to divert scarce resources to viral testing. The monopolization of policy authority by one profession is one manifestation of reduced regional capacity to allocate resources optimizing public efficiency. The ruling political party’s further decision to muzzle most of the province’s health policy analysts during the pandemic is another.

The researcher’s attempts to inquire with the testing facility were flatly refused, though like the hospitals it was being underutilized and demand was not an issue until September 2020. Only with the fall second-wave flare-up were test and tracing facilities’ capacities reluctantly, gradually expanded, but never to sufficient capacity to slow the cascade of transmission. In addition to the dearth of awareness of low-incapacitation pandemic strategies, the lack of receptiveness to the expertise offered reflects low regional capacity to distinguish and use research expertise. A contrast is in higher-capacity Minnesota, in which a senior public health official, a social scientist with health and epidemiology research expertise and graduate education through the Hubert Humphrey Public Policy Institute, was responsible for coordinating state testing capacity in the early months of 2020–though he also struggled to secure testing capacity against medical authorities and corporations defending the priority of their existing financial interests. Still, by January 2021, Minnesota’s public policy experts had made COVID-19 vaccination freely available to the public, while back in low-capacity Manitoba, no one had even thought to assign vaccine distribution responsibility to anyone until January 2021. The Manitoba government and political organizers leaned on simple, indefinite mass incapacitation. There are many other examples of sidelined and decommissioned regional capacity in low-capacity prairie Canada, including gagged public health officials with inequality-variables portfolios; a comparative COVID-19 economic policy researcher excluded from policy formation; a lack of policy tailoring the militaristic quarantine approach to isolate easily-geographically-isolatable rural patriarchal religious communities that had decided to forego any pandemic policies; and the de facto exclusion of 20-29 year olds from testing (where other jurisdictions had institutionalized ready testing access for that population of people with low likelihood of serious symptoms and high communicability risk: low job control, high service work, crowded housing, and high socialization requirements).

Given low capacity and undesirable pandemic results, there was only coordinated regional agitation for…more profound quarantine. Two important conditions show how off-track are responses to quarantine inefficiency that call for more quarantine: low-capacity regions’ insensitivity to local housing conditions, and counterproductive aping of the military logic in quarantine.

In the first case, homes are reconceived as prison cells in the defense-planning quarantine strategy. Yet in many parts of unequal North America, this strategy becomes counterproductive as the housing assumption in the quarantine model is violated. In low-capacity regions, too many people have unreliable and crowded housing arrangements that cancel their capacity to isolate in nuclear family cells. Whereas it doesn’t matter in military lockdown operations that only have the goal of incapacitating enemy combatants, housing insecurity can be a primary source of pandemic quarantine inefficiency. Further, the population afflicted with housing security intersects with the population afflicted with low worker-control service sector work, magnifying the undercut to lockdown strategy’s foundational assumptions. Mass quarantine isn’t really the ultimate solution to pandemic. It’s not always about size, guys.

As quarantine is a pandemic intervention on the military operation model, it redistributes capacitation and incapacitation. It leaves men in military-like jobs fraternizing and roaming widely, as Essential Workers. So for example, policing-style jobs such as Conservation Officers fraternize and roam unnecessarily where their work could be accomplished from home. Well into mass quarantine, Manitoba Conservation Officers were mandated to travel back and forth between offices in high-transmission Steinbeck (a town characterized by thick patriarchal collectivism and a refusal to participate in pandemic policies) and their homes in Winnipeg, bringing COVID-19 back to the city with them. This in turn exposed female family members with work expertise that could better inform pandemic policy to SARS-COV-2 as well as increased child care demands. Low-capacity quarantine counterproductively apes the military-operations style. In quarantine pandemic strategy, the distribution of freedom, capacitation v. incapacitation, by gender (at least the gender of the work) is not incidental. It would take high state capacity and a knowledgeable citizenry to moderate the patriarchal bias of militaristic quarantine strategy. Those conditions do not pertain in low-capacity regions.

Mass quarantine has been a spotlight policy of the relatively-avuncular US Democrat Party, highly integrated and influential in worldwide liberal political party networks and policy formation. It bears remembering what interests, within an engineered-antidemocratic polity, the Democrat Party primarily represents: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. A low-capacity region cannot moderate the coordinated quarantine-and-automation campaign tied to pandemic crisis. This international campaign relies on fear of mortality and the crude, mass quarantine strategy to replace skilled, public, compensated and unionized social reproduction labour with automation. For example, politically-embedded international automation businesses added their economic weight to the effort to expand mass quarantine to replace reduced-school week, socially-distanced, small class education with 100% online training. This was sold, as commercial schemes are, with affect, by social media campaigns invoking frightened teachers. Particularly given the absence of infrastructure accommodating life–such as capital and legal controls, capital taxation, a comfortable UBI, integrity public housing, and state protections of service workers’ economic democracy rights, excessive and inappropriate automation riding the back of incapacitation threatens the human and economic development of dependent regions.

Jurisdictions that close schools and switch to heavily-touted 100% online training strategy do not reduce SARS-COV-2 transmission. They just push youth out to contribute to cross-age group transmission. The average age of COVID-19 mortality is around 84 years old, slightly older than average mortality pre-COVID-19. The capacity to take into account the age bias in COVID-19 mortality, as well as comorbidities associated with prolonged isolation, recommends augmenting our organizing repertoire beyond extended carceral biosecurity strategy.

Low-capacity regions would benefit from refraining from throwing in behind the most-promoted mass incapacitation policy, rather devoting scarce resources to identifying regional research expertise—particularly beyond the usual patriarchal authority networks facilitating extractivism—and convening that research expertise in epidemiological collectives designing and implementing tailored, targeted policy. If we could direct our organizing capacity, we could for one example separate people by age groups to improve pandemic outcomes. Incorporating recognition of the extreme upper-end age bias of COVID-19 mortality, modeling demonstrates an approach that balances the mortality-depressing objective of quarantine with the objective of reducing isolation damage. Researchers “find that separating age groups by reducing interactions between them protects the general population and reduces mortality rates” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs. Such destructive policy requires researcher attention to tactics of moderation: “While complete isolation from society may be the most protective scenario for the elderly population, it would have an emotional and possibly cognitive impact that might outweigh its benefit. The addition of new connections within the same age group to compensate for the lost connections outside the age group still has a strong beneficial influence and reduces the total death toll by about 62%.”

We have been thinking of and using quarantine as a low-capacity last resort. That is the very opposite of what the strategy is designed for. As with any military operation, quarantine is destructive and depleting; and it is particularly counterproductive where life-supporting infrastructure is absent, a common condition after a half century of neoliberalization. Moreover, quarantine is a dangerous pandemic strategy where we do not have the capacity to even detect its perverse effects, let alone anticipate or address them. In tributary hinterlands, it is normal for extractive, rentier, and patriarchal authorities to substitute for disconnected regional capacities and scientific research literacy. That social substitution makes these regions low-capacity.

On top of the tendency to dig unsatisfactory quarantine deeper, there is tremendous inclination to toss up our hands, celebrating the advent of SARS-COV-2 vaccination commerce. Yet if we research the scholarly analyses of the conditions contributing to viral virulence and transmission, we will see that epidemics and pandemics are, like other terrestrial crises, accelerating; and while celebration is nice if sad in isolation, we would be far smarter, collectively (including social epidemiology researchers, not just MDs), regionally planning how to better handle viral outbreaks in relation to local conditions.

Update, December 20, 2020

O, what have we here? The SARS-COV-2 virus mutated in the UK into B.1.1.7, and now everyone’s shutting down travel to and from the UK and Boris Johnson is personally chaining Londoners to their basement washing machines.

Think about going to to the best sources, like JAMA and The Lancet and Science and Nature and the Swedish Health Ministry and Wallace et al 2020, who explain why viral mutation is accelerating. That’s who people need to listen to. Stop deferring to MDs covering their asses. Stop deferring to Dr. Strangelove. Stop deferring to Astra Zenaca et al, their lab coats and their investors. Stop struggling to make sense of state-corporate media’s pathetic pretense that in the year 2020 school children, let alone adult environmentalists, don’t know about core consumption and trade’s relation to deforestation, a claim made to somehow, roughly authorize the indefinite mass quarantine-to-vaccine tactic. Stop deferring to liberal political party spin doctors scrabbling to line up your vote with their donor class’ interests. All of those are inappropriate authorities for knowledge about a viral pandemic. Start listening to researchers who are interested in the problem and how to address it, but not getting paid to herd everyone off the cliff.

Trust me. I would never ask you to think about the verboten question: Should we lock up everyone indefinitely, so that 84-year-olds have the chance to die of regular flu rather than a coronavirus? No, that question is transcendentally immoral.

* Appendix:
What is Sociology, and Why are Sociologists Well Outfitted to Contribute to Informed Policy Development in a Pandemic?

Typically people–including media– in low-capacity regions imagine/hope that Sociology is a homey blend of psychology, social work, finishing school, marketing, and HR (Human Resources), while Criminology is its brass-tacks masculine partner, engaged in the practical task of locking down criminals. There is a kind of Sociologist, the social-psychologist, that may approach this common-sense imaginary, and to be fair, they’re often employed in teaching mass introductory courses–courses designed to be non-threatening and pop culture-laden, so as to invite young people to pursue an undergraduate degree in the discipline, so that the department can show it is bringing in revenue.

As a Sociologist, I am a political economist and a theoretician. I research the history of elite political organization and financial policy; toxic waste politics, policy, and outcomes; comparative immigration politics, policy, and outcomes; alternative economic organizing; the development of epigenetics… that sort of thing.

When media calls me for my expertise, they ask me to pronounce as an authority on things like, “How should couples relate to each other during home lockdown?” and “Why should this immigrant group not express its history in Canadian public space?” These are normative “questions” (not really questions) by which state-corporate media regulate intimate relationships and flog the ideal of popular ignorance for the convenience of Settler Country human resources management. The journalist already has an answer, and wants the Sociologist to hit it, hopefully efficiently, so the journalist can attribute the spin to the Sociologist as a disinterested, knowledgeable observer. I am incentivized by my university to bloviate upon such regulatory topics. The upside is the kinds of things I am called as an authority on are homey, banal, and low-consequences. On the other hand, the more I pretend that these are my areas of expertise, the more the public has no idea what Sociologists do, and the more they imagine we do a homey blend of psychology, social work, finishing school, marketing, and HR.

I have a number of areas of deep and pertinent expertise that I will never be deferred to upon, or asked to relate to a public; but I am not much more of an authority on the order-reproducing corporate-state population-regulation comms than anyone on the street. As a Sociologist, I am actually much less inclined to corporate-state population regulation work than communications professionals, social workers, etc.; which is why my research expertise is commonly denied. Due to my aggregate education, experience, and skills, I can provide better guidance to them than many other people–if I could do what I do, which is research questions with significant, complex social causation. That’s not what media is about, and media deadlines prohibit research. As well, see the fact that there is already a correct answer, and being interviewed by media is simply an exercise in fishing where you are the fish. Basically, the only legitimate reasons why an academic would do media service is if she really does media-coalitional work for a patron, political party, or a country, which some do, or she is looking for a quid-pro-quo relationship with a journalist.

More typically, professional research Sociologists employed at a university are not doing anything like Introduction to Sociology, psychology, HR, or social work. What do they do? And why is Sociology particularly pertinent for navigating crises?

1. Sociology is a science that emerges from the Enlightenment, meaning: We specialize in researching and comparing in specified context different approaches to problem-solving issues related to social organization. This expertise comes in handy where we have a systemic, human-generated problem, such as climate crisis, racism, sexism, inequalities, and pandemics, etc.
2. As a science, we use and develop theory to communicate findings and sort out logic within an international and transhistorical scientific community. As a science, we proceed upon the assumption that more data points over time and space, and more minds in methodical inquiry and conversation produce better knowledge than a warlord fatcat club’s perspective, their political party’s strategy as comms, or even the more nuanced perspective of their court philosopher. While it has been dropped under pressure in certain times and places, our special responsibility is building knowledge that could be used to inform decisionmaking in a productive, high-integrity democracy. We don’t have a lot of patrons in our enterprise.
   1. But I will say that tributary regions strongly underestimate the degree to which they could profitably use Sociological knowledge to avoid crisis-offloading and chart a less-dependent economic path. That would take a lot of insight and foresight that tends to be thin on the ground in tributary peripheries.
3. Though, Sociologists study philosophy, because we know what philosophers are good at: Meticulous and specified logic, given a set of assumptions and goals.
4. We study historians‘ work, because we know what they’re good at: Finding and reporting on original source data. Sociologists know the pace at which most social, political, and economic relations change–slowly–and we know that what historians have seen and reported is usually still the case.
5. We study geographers’ work, because how things work varies across different environments and social, political, and economic hierarchy spread across space.
6. We use legal scholarship investigating how lawyers help rulers take assets. We have studied what rulers say and do, and why, and we keep that in perspective when we’re assessing how to problem-solve.
7. Sociologists know what librarians are good for: Finding the higher-quality data and information, rather than spin and diversions, whether cheap or expensive.
8. Some Sociologists study the findings of epidemiologists, epigeneticists, and ecologists, in order to piece together what is causing health and ecological crises.
9. A Sociologist is prepared to pursue knowledge within the complexity of socially-intertwined relations–with multiple research methods, not only secondary research (see 4-8 above), but primary research as well, from quantitative statistical methods that allow us to identify trends based on past data, to qualitative methods that allow us to methodically interrogate people’s experiences and survey how they communicate given their context, to historical documents research that allows us to find out what people have done, felt, and said behind the scenes, behind the hype.

You might think to yourself: Well, anyone can do the above research. Mm. No, but also, they don’t, do they. There’s a reason for that, see point #1 above. Sociology keeps alive a stream of organicist science, where that is usually under attack as anti-capitalist, because the goal of full, Enlightenment science is democratic knowledge, not profit.

Not all Sociologists are trained like this. Most aren’t. But this is what Sociologists do, as distinct from social work, psychology, English Departments, and business, not to mention law, philosophy, management, and medicine.

Limits of the Gentrification Narrative

Does a fear of gentrification mean that we should not fight for making public places, streets, and parks better? No. This knowledge only highlights the importance of community members’ involvement in tackling neighborhood change. This knowledge also emphasizes the importance of creating places that benefit everyone – places that connect existing residents, instead of dividing, alienating, or displacing them, and places that enhance the existing character of a neighborhood, instead of erasing it.” –Kahne, 2015, “Does Placemaking Cause Gentrification?,” PPS.org.

While this planning article struggles with the overextension of the “gentrification” master narrative, it hints at the geographical limits of this theory’s applicability beyond global metropoles, economically-exclusive places where developers targeting a smallholder managerial class serving a global millionaire and billionaire class have uprooted and erased well-connected, flourishing, and socially-mobile working class communities like Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Toronto, London UK, and San Francisco.

Consider that the problem with gentrification is not just the middle working-class purchase of some small amount of livable private space from the racialized poor, and the accompanying addition of a couple of coffeehouses (as can slowly happen on a couple of streets in Winnipeg). The critical concept emerges to describe the uprooting of a diverse and thriving community of smallholders from capacity-enhancing urban public amenities that they themselves have built and fought for over time. Planners’ solution to the latter problem is institutionalized community consultation, connected to theory for democratic development. It’s clear that Winnipeg has long repressed planning capacity, including community consultation capacity, in favor of monopoly developer control, and this continues to be the norm. However, that is another, older, hinterlands problem.

Institutionalized planning incapacity and general democratic underdevelopment as a colonial legacy continually refreshed by weak newcomer citizenship should not be reduced to the metropole phenomenon of gentrification, because popular gentrification-critique morality stigmatizes and suggests reducing non-poverty smallholder collective action capacity in order to amplify the evident “voice” of the poor, such as represented in poverty advocates’ recent romantic accounts by Bain Financial Corporation (the Dollar Store owner, among other investment asset holdings). Bain Financial’s capacity to serve as a “patron” and “voice” of the racialized poor is not threatened in Winnipeg. This is because Winnipeg’s anti-democratic institutions are strong, and Bain Financial is, like other market institutions supposedly native to and culturally owned by the poor (at least in antidemocratic neoclassical economic “consumer sovereignty” theory), an anti-democratic market institution. Its poverty “advocacy” agenda consists strictly in profiteering from and reproducing poverty, as complement to its privatization portfolio.

Theoretical entrepreneurship suggesting that any income-increasing class diversification of a neighbourhood, or even any isolated instance of community-consultation failure, is the gentrification problem empties gentrification of its critical specificity, and worse, in Winnipeg, contributes to the traditional problems of democratic, public collective-action incapacitation and planning and amenity poverty.

Unlike global metropoles, Winnipeg is not a town where the problem is the new economic-inequality-driven, private-property exclusion of the collectively-rich, privately-less-affluent from their own legacy of rich city shared public amenities. Winnipeg is a railroad population center in an extractivist region that is amenity-poor because it has a long-time, settler-colonial, cross-class democratic collective-action deficit (particularly relative to the power of regional developers). Winnipeg’s urban race problems are continually reproduced by the cultural norm reducing democratic development to consumer sovereignty. That reduction denies and evades the salient problem of building democratic collective-action capacity across colonial, settler, and newcomer conflicts of interest.

Urban geography has found that the neighborhoods with the proven capacity to build their own (not Bain Financial Corporation’s) institutions strengthening their social and political capital, are rarely homogeneous poverty neighbourhoods. Not charity or poverty advocacy, but class diversity with strong communication and high solidarity and collective-action capacity can strengthen and develop neighbourhoods, and permit stronger social mobility. Contra the gentrification critique, the problem in hinterlands is how to form coalitions across class, citizenship status, and racial difference that can organize for the new institution of humanist amenities that do not reproduce human stunting (as distinct from millionaire/billionaire thwarting). What do we need to organize that can improve the life quality and life chances of the regional coalition of smallholders?

 

 

Where slavery thrived, inequality rules today, stunts development

More than a century later, some experts say, a terrible institution is still exacting its price.

By Stephen Mihm  AUGUST 24, 2014

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Standard and Poor’s Rating Services, a credit rating firm that rarely weighs in on social issues, published a scathing report on income inequality and social mobility in the United States. The firm warned that current levels of inequality were “dampening” growth, and predicted that “inequalities will extend into the next generation, with diminished opportunities for upward social mobility.”

This unusual report on inequality, like Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book on the same subject, addresses unequal fortunes, declining mobility, and stagnating economic growth as national or even global problems, which demand similarly large-scale solutions. But scholars are also well aware that these problems vary greatly from place to place. Consider a recent, much-publicized study of social mobility by economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley. As the illuminating map generated by that study shows, children born in some regions—Salt Lake City and San Jose, Calif., for example—have a reasonable shot of moving up the social ladder. By contrast, many parts of the former Confederacy, it seems, are now the places where the American dream goes to die.

Why is that true? At first blush, you might guess race could explain the variation. When the study’s authors crunched the data, they found that the larger the Black population in any given county, the lower the overall social mobility. But there was more to the story than Blacks unable to break the cycle of poverty. In a passing comment, Chetty and his co-authors observed that “both Blacks and Whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility.” Far from being divergent, the fates of poor Blacks and poor Whites in these regions are curiously, inextricably, intertwined.

Institutions are Built to Maintain, Automate Collective Action

Slavers Built Inegalitarian Institutions

Instead of chalking it up to race, recent research points toward a more startling and somewhat controversial explanation: When we see broad areas of inequality in America today, what we are actually seeing is the lingering stain of slavery. Since 2002, with increasing refinement in the years since, economic historians have argued that the “peculiar institution,” as it was once called, is dead but not gone. Today, in the 21st century, it still casts an economic shadow over both Blacks and Whites: “Slavery,” writes Harvard economist Nathan Nunn, “had a long-term effect on inequality as well as income.”

His work is representative of a new, more historical direction within economics. Its proponents believe that institutions devised centuries ago tend to persist, structuring economic reality in the 21st century in ways that are largely invisible. Their hope is that, by tracing these connections between past and present, they may be able to point the way toward more effective solutions to today’s seemingly intractable economic problems.

Engerman & Sokoloff’s (2002) Institutional-econ Hypothesis Explains Inequality and Economic Stagnation

IN 2002, two economic historians, Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, published an influential paper that tried to answer a vexing question: why are some countries in the Americas defined by far more extreme and enduring levels of inequality—and by extension, limited social mobility and economic underdevelopment—than others?

The answer, they argued, lay in the earliest history of each country’s settlement. The political and social institutions put in place then tended to perpetuate the status quo. They concluded that societies that began “with extreme inequality tended to adopt institutions that served to advantage members of the elite and hamper social mobility.” This, they asserted, resulted in economic underdevelopment over the long run.

More specifically, they observed that regions where sugar could be profitably grown invariably gave rise to societies defined by extreme inequality. The reason, they speculated, had to do with the fact that large-scale sugar plantations made intensive use of slave labor, generating institutions that privileged a small elite of white planters over a majority of Black slaves. These institutions, their later work suggested, could encompass everything from property rights regimes to tax structures to public schools.

Harvard economist Nathan Nunn offered a more detailed statistical analysis of this “Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis” in a paper first published in 2008. His research confirmed that early slave use in the Americas was correlated with poor long-term growth. More specifically, he examined county-level data on slavery and inequality in the United States, and found a robust correlation between past reliance on slave labor and both economic underdevelopment and contemporary inequality. He disagreed with Engerman and Sokoloff’s claim that it was only large-scale plantation slavery that generated these effects; rather, he found, any kind of slavery seemed to have begotten long-term economic woes.

Nunn also offered a more precise explanation for present-day troubles. In Engerman and Sokoloff’s narrative, slavery led to inequality, which led to economic underdevelopment. But when Nunn examined levels of inequality in 1860—as measured by holdings of land—these proved a poor predictor of future problems. Only the presence of slavery was a harbinger of problems. “It is not economic inequality that caused the subsequent development of poor institutions,” wrote Nunn. “Rather, it was slavery itself.”

Soares, Assuncao & Goulart (2012) clarify that not race but slavery intensity begets long-term economic inequality

This finding was echoed in a study by Brazilian economists Rodrigo Soares, Juliano Assunção, and Tomás Goulart published in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2012. Soares and his colleagues examined the connection between historical slavery and contemporary inequality in a number of countries, largely in Latin America. The authors found a consistent correlation between the existence—and intensity—of slavery in the past and contemporary inequality. Moreover, this relationship was independent of the number of people of African descent living there today. As Soares said in an interview, “Societies that used more slavery are not more unequal simply because they have relatively more black people.”

The question, then, is how exactly did slavery have this effect on contemporary inequality? Soares and his colleagues speculated that limited political rights for slaves and their descendants played a role, as did negligible access to credit and capital. Racial discrimination, too, would have played a part, though this would not explain why Whites born in former slaveholding regions might find themselves subject to higher levels of inequality.

Inequality-transmission Mechanism: Public Institutions are Stunted in Slavery Zones

The Toll of Inegalitarian Anti-public Institutions Over Time: A Dearth of Public Infrastructure Translates Inegalitarian Economic Growth into Economic Stagnation

Nunn, though, advanced an additional explanation, pointing to an idea advanced by Stanford economic historian Gavin Wright in 2006.

In lands turned over to slavery, Wright had observed, there was little incentive to provide so-called public goods—schools, libraries, and other institutions—that attract migrants. In the North, by contrast, the need to attract and retain free labor in areas resulted in a far greater investment in public goods—institutions that would, over the succeeding decades, offer far greater opportunities for social mobility and lay the foundation for sustained, superior economic growth.

As it happens, a contemporary critic of slavery took it upon himself to measure some of these differences between North and South. In 1857, a Southerner named Hinton Rowan Helper published an incendiary book titled “The Impending Crisis.” Though a virulent racist, Helper was no friend of slavery, and he quantified in excruciating detail the relative number of schools, libraries, and other institutions in both free and slaveholding states, finding time and again that his region failed to measure up to the North.

In Pennsylvania he found 393 public libraries, but in South Carolina, a mere 26. In the South, he observed, “the common school-house, the poor man’s college, is hardly known, showing how little interest is felt in the chief treasures of the State, the immortal minds of the multitude who are not born to wealth.”

Inegalitarians Resist Recognizing Inequality’s Costs

Institutionalized Hegemony Can Divorce People from Their Own Interests: Southern Whites Surprised to Find They Benefit When Public Institutions Imposed

WHAT SOMEONE like Helper may not have foreseen is that the abolition of slavery would not cure these ills. The destruction of slavery did not destroy all the political institutions, social mores, and cultural traditions that sustained it. Nor did it make public institutions, of the kind that the North had been building for decades, suddenly come into being.

This notion about the “persistence” of economic institutions is part of a larger dialogue within economics. Economists ranging from MIT’s Daron Acemoglu to Harvard’s Melissa Fisher have examined how institutions and practices adopted centuries ago can shape economic reality. But not everyone buys the idea that the past can structure the present in such an enduring, predictable fashion. Wright is among the critics of this approach; he is skeptical of Engerman and Sokoloff’s hypothesis. “The persistence of inequality per se is a myth,” he says, pointing to research that highlights the degree to which inequality has ebbed and flowed in Latin America.

Wright counts himself “unconvinced” regarding comparable claims about the United States. “No doubt slavery has played some kind of background role,” he concedes. But he sees the relationship between historical slavery and contemporary inequality as an interesting correlation, not a directly causal one. Correlating one variable with another across the centuries “isn’t the same as writing history,” he notes. “If you don’t connect the dots, you’re just groping.”

[MJF: While it is true that theory-naive correlation is the bread and butter of Cold War Economics, History is another profession that made Cold War accommodations with US military and business elites. Because they eschew theory (they don’t believe that institutions function to reproduce observable patterns of dispositions and behaviour), Cold War-trained historians like Wright also fail to achieve scientific standards of evidence-supported knowledge. Here Wright failed to recognize that the institutional economists are connecting the dots, using theory–scholarly community knowledge– to bolster correlation and time order. That is the gold standard for valid knowledge, given human lack of omniscience. The institutional economists are saying that what connects slavery and economic stagnation is a lack of institutionalized public supports for democratic development. Instead, by neglecting public institutions supporting human rights and development, slavers’ societies reproduce elite privileges and mass stunting. The role of institutions in social reproduction is not only Sociology 101, it is further confirmed by conservative theory, which values the elite monopolization of recognition, credit, and cooperation as the basis of the conservative utopia, the steep and immobile social hierarchy.]

Another [naive] criticism of the “persistence” school is that it may justify passivity. If counties or countries have always been poor or unequal because of something that happened so long ago, what chance do contemporary policy makers have at deflecting the dead hand of the past?

But there is room for hope, as Wright’s own research would suggest. In “Sharing the Prize,” an economic history of the civil rights movement published in 2013, Wright found that efforts to end discrimination paid substantial, enduring benefits to Black Southerners. Perhaps more surprisingly, he found that the movement benefited Whites, too. Many poorer Whites found that that the destruction of the old order—the end of poll taxes, for example—ushered in increased levels of public funding for schools, newfound political power, and a host of other economic, political, and educational benefits, particularly in the years immediately following the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Ameliorating the Dead Hand of the Past: To “Create Social Mobility & Economic Growth Regionally”…Or to Proliferate Public Institutions Supporting Human Development?

That revolution, of course, is still a work in progress. As we’ve been reminded over the last two weeks by the clashes in Ferguson, Mo., between mostly Black protesters and a mostly white police force, there’s a long way to go before the vestiges of slavery are fully and finally made a thing of the past. But this new body of research may help us grasp that solutions to persistent inequality will require more focused policies. Increasing the level of food stamps, as economist Paul Krugman has suggested, might help, but it is perhaps too diffuse and indiscriminate a solution.

Instead, the best way to deal with the lingering effects of dead institutions like slavery may be to create regional institutions aimed to promoting social mobility and economic growth. Georgia, for example, has tried to level the field with the “HOPE Scholarship,” which enables high schoolers with a “B” average or higher to attend in-state public colleges and universities for free and private in-state schools at a heavy discount.

Such programs, with some modifications, could go a long way toward promoting social mobility in the former slaveholding regions of the United States. That’s not to say that the problems will be easy to solve. But the progress we’ve already made, both politically and economically, would suggest that while we may live in slavery’s shadow, we are not prisoners of the past, either.

Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, and co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” (2010).

This article was published online in the Boston Globe in 2014; but in 2019 it was no longer available online, so I have added it here. I have added my own subtitles to help Sociologists navigate through Mihm’s disciplinary metaphysics and personal politics. As of 2022, the article had reappeared and is accessible in the Boston Globe online.

References

The Boston Globe. (Given the high concentration of scholars and universities in the area, this Boston media outlet sometimes provides high-quality academic analyses. A lot of sports stories though.)

Bradley, C. 2022. “The South’s racist past is harming workers today. Unions can help us build a new future.” USA Today, November 26. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2022/11/26/union-workers-south-rare-changing/10751564002/

Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. 2014. “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.”

(Note for Community Economic Development research: Patrick Kline is the econometrician in this group. He also publishes comparative economic assessments of “place-based policies.”)

Engerman, Stanley and Kenneth Sokoloff. 2002. “Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development Among New World Economics.” NBER Working Paper 9259.

Helper, Hinton Rowan. 1857. The Impending Crisis of the South. New York.

Mihm, Stephen. 2007. A Nation Of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, And The Making Of The United States. Harvard.

Nunn, Nathan. 2008. The Long Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades. Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (1) : 139-176.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the 21st Century. Belknap Harvard.

Soares, Rodrigo, Juliano Assunção, and Tomás Goulart. 2012. “A Note on Slavery and the Roots of Inequality.” Journal of Comparative Economics 40(4):565–580.

Wright, Gavin. 2006. (Note: I cannot locate this reference. Berkeley’s Wright is retired. Note also that the Cold War American economics profession labored to deny inequality as a socio-economic problem; Wright represents that old guard.)

Wright, Gavin. 2013. Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Roaming Rights Now!

Over the last couple of years there have been books and bills introduced to establish Roaming Right in Anglo-American jurisdictions. Roaming Rights were denied in the colonies on the grounds that indigenous people had to be cleared from the land to make way for colonial extraction. As contested as they were and are, Roaming Rights were established for indigenous populations in treaties between colonial and indigenous governments, however.

The racist, colonial denial of universal Roaming Right in Anglo-American law produces an unjust conflation between private land required for living, such as a house, a yard, and a garden, and mass-acreage land privately owned, for example in land speculation, for the accumulation of social power over other citizens, rival rentier capitalists, and global markets. In Marxist terms, this (im)moral conflation reflects the power-blind liberal conflation of capitalist use value–profit–with general use values, which legitimates sovereign-consumer and consumer-market choice arguments, private monopoly and collusion, corporate deregulation, inequality, and general capitalist Best of All Possible Worlds assumption/argumentation. Under this ruling and codified conceptual conflation, even homes have been used in apartheid settler societies not for shelter (use value), a necessary minimal condition of health, enjoyment and development, but as assets (capital) permitting Whites and global economic victors to claim intergenerational wealth over, power over, and capacity to exclude Blacks and smallholders.

This conceptual blindness is the vehicle through which inequality produces inegalitarianism, despite liberalism’s formal subscription to the former and proscription of the latter. While it brings liberalism to coalesce with conservatism, liberalism’s formal separation of inequality and inegalitarianism keeps liberalism able to co-opt the exhausted portions of its egalitarian opposition, and better able to maintain law; in this way, while it’s less immediately appealing than conservative exceptionalism, liberalism can ultimately outcompete raw conservatism, devoted to inequality, inegalitarianism, and exceptionalism. Or, liberalism and conservatism together create a system-stabilizing oscillation of strategies that pragmatists and true-believers alike can insert themselves into.

Because of this lack of conceptual distinction, for a long time, the incapacity to recognize a public interest in cross-population, sustainable use of land and water supported an inegalitarian elite-settler coalition dedicated to absolute, exclusive private property in liberal societies. This institutionalized blindness to public interest, this inegalitarianism can be observed every day in financial apartheid advertisements for gated rural and suburban property and Poor Door urban real estate property, in excluding curtains and punitive air travel policies corralling most travelers, and in the enduring public goods and services poverty of historical slavery counties. It sustains a socialized inability to distinguish depletion activities on land and water from sustainable activities. This apartheid-society conceptual incapacity was useful for establishing colonies as premier global sites of unfettered resource extraction and unfree labor exploitation and expropriation.

Restoring Collective-action Capacity and Freedom in Rural Tributaries

In the latter-day context of global monopoly capitalism, with its institutionalized wealth cores and tributary peripheries, these conceptual incapacities, codified in law, strongly undermine the freedom and reproductive capacity of non-elite, smallholder settlers. It is another case where in the multi-generational run, non-elite settlers would have been better off in coalition with peasantified indigenous people and enslaved workers than serving as grunts for elite colonial interests, under the hope that their own patrimony would be protected, not by a politically- and socially-constructed status such as citizenship, but by a magical, mythical identity conferred only at elite convenience–White Ownership.

To start off with, as discussed above, smallholders’ interests–in securing living space and life enjoyment in balance with others–are not reducible to or stably, largely compatible with mass-property owning rentier-capitalists’ interests in mining wealth for the exclusive, advantageous accumulation of social power and control over other citizens, over rival rentier capitalists, and over global markets. Whiteness politics are the result of a naive, excessive belief in the munificence and durability of economic elites’ instrumentalist marketing campaigns. But as the recent mass primitive accumulation of New Zealand, the Canadian West, and particularly the US West demonstrate, even Christian Texan billionaires–raised as Masters of Whiteness sacralization and politics–will not maintain White coalition in all those places where non-Whites have already been cleared from the land (Turkewitz 2019). If you cannot count on even Evangelical Texas oil-extractionist billionaire patriarchs for White protection, do you think it’s a good social contract option for you to buy into?

As a mystical moral exclusion, a promise of inclusion in an exclusive coalition with ruthless, teeth-baring elites, the White political construction was always designed to be land-owning elites’ paw of control over a traumatized, fearful population, for elites’ own political benefit, if variably distributing lesser resources to a malleable “White” “police” force. The broad Whiteness elite-“police” coalition is easily scrapped–in England, but just as well in the militarized, surveillance-embedded settler colonies–in favor of the narrower elite-police employer relationship in Nightwatchman societies. Today’s capital-intensive, tech-addled Nightwatchman policing relationship with exclusive, absolute, mass private property severely curtails non-elite freedom and enjoyment–from snowmobiling to fishing to hunting, to cross country skiing, mushroom gathering, forest bathing, walking, clean-water swimming, stargazing, fresh air, and so on–outside of capitalism’s expensive urban metropole commodity market.

Roaming Right & Freedom of Movement, Right of the “Starving” Man in an Excluding, Privatized World Economy

In Europe, Roaming Rights were codified in law in the mid-20th century (In England, they were codified in liberal law in 2001). They distinguish the exclusionary space needed for living–the yard, garden, house, barn, garage–from the larger, decommodified space required for people, the public, to both modestly supplement private life and enjoy sustainable use of the political-territory’s land: hiking, fishing, swimming, boating, horse watering, berry gathering, and camping rights, etc. Roaming Rights assume that people are living, reproducing, developing Earthlings, and therefore the public needs to traverse–move freely–and enjoy life in a social, balancing, non-depleting manner. This assumption is not shared by property right law, built for perpetual conquering (See the influential, founding formulations of property right and its underlying assumptions, forwarded by liberal-conservative theorists including Hobbes, Grotius, and Burke’s later reconciliation with capitalist liberalism, etc.). Roaming Right corrects property right and its antihuman excesses.

Organizing for Roaming Rights is important in the settler colonies today because inequality has grown to the point where settlers are financially excluded from global rentier capitalism’s metropoles, while at the same time they are losing access to the dispersed resources required to live and enjoy life in the tributary regions. In this context, tributary settler-indigenous coalition is vital. After all, and all pretty mystifications aside, how are indigenous people made? Indigenous people are not another, animal-like species or colorful otherworldly visitation, as political discourse has predominantly constructed them. Whatever their history and culture, the indigenous have been repeatedly constructed, and will be made out of the raw material of people again, by imperialists prohibiting indigenous people’s free movement and access to the necessities and enjoyment of life outside of inaccessible, commodified, commercial cities. Race is network boundary construction, and it’s not been as tight or class-distinguishing a boundary as wealth accumulators prefer. Today’s FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate industry) and surveillance and military tech do the exact same function, tighter.

Every capitalist elite is afraid of working class settlers and smallholders recognizing that they can be made indigenous or enslaved. To some extent this is an honest, liberal fear, because many smallholding settlers have, with but a little elite threat/encouragement, moved from that sociological, historical realization to “Better you than me” imperial warfare against indigenized people, the enslaved, and descendents thereof (See Wilson 1976).

But that honest fear has always been in coalition with the much more self-interested elite fear that other smallholding settlers will coalesce politically with the indigenized, the enslaved, and their descendants. By suppressing non-elite organic intellectuals, we have hardly come to terms with this liberal-conservative elite coalition, the imperial “civilized” bloc, and its ravaging effects.

Instead, apartheid society is fed a nonstop stream of conservative and liberal high and low cultural enforcement, cementing us apart along the difference-justice telos: Whites must know only their unjust, isolated historical place. Reified, stylized, Black positionality, Black Exceptionalism will carry difference justice (as that is reduced to liberal Dem Party political rentier strategy). In the UK, this quasi-historical (permitting recognition of heritage, but prohibiting recognition of ongoing social construction, social reproduction) cultural pseudo-speciation is further reinforced through regional class distinctions.

…

The Primitive Accumulation of the US West in the 21st Century

From Turkewitz 2019: “In the last decade, private land in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-square-mile expanse, according to the Land Report, a magazine that tracks large purchases. Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.”

The fracking-lord Wilks brothers “who now own some 700,000 acres across several states, have become a symbol of the out-of-touch owner. In Idaho, as their property has expanded, the brothers have shuttered trails and hired armed guards to patrol their acres, blocking and stymying access not only to their private property, but also to some publicly owned areas…The Wilks brothers see what they are doing as a duty. God had given them much, Justin said. In return, he said, “we feel that we have a responsibility to the land.”

“Gates with “private property” signs were going up across the region. In some places, the Wilkses’ road closings were legal. In other cases, it wasn’t clear. Road law is a tangled knot, and Boise County had little money to grapple with it in court. So the gates stayed up.

…The Wilks family hired a lobbyist to push for a law that would stiffen penalties for trespass…

The problem, said Mr. Horting, “is not the fact that they own the property. It’s that they’ve cut off public roads.”

“We’re being bullied,” he added. “We can’t compete and they know it” (Turkewitz 2019).

As well, financial institutions started dispensing with land titling a few years ago, so in the post-2007 property grab, claims on property are going to fall to might rather than right. It’s a new mass primitive accumulation offensive.

Climate Crisis, Unproductive Capital, & Elite Rentier Strategy

While they let their Republican henchmen lull the peasantry with squeals of “No climate crisis” for decades, billionaire rentier capitalists shifted quietly into land-capturing overdrive.

“Brokers say the new arrivals are driven in part by a desire to invest in natural assets while they are still abundant, particularly amid a fear of economic, political and climate volatility.

‘There is a tremendous underground, not-so-subtle awareness from people who realize that resources are getting scarcer and scarcer,’ said Bernard Uechtritz, a real estate adviser” (Turkewitz 2019).

The Persistent Role of Moralism in Expropriation

Moving into extractive fracking from a Texas religious franchise, the Wilks Bros provide a strong example of how extractivism and expropriation is buttressed by moralism.

While buying political and legal cover, they continually assert that their antisocial land speculation offensive is mandated by God, sacralizing their self-interested conflation of smallholder living space with their own, exclusionary mass capture of land.

Expropriative, Gilded-Age Restoration: Separating Out Global Rentier Capitalists’ Interests from Smallholder Interests

TBD

The Urbanite’s Interest in Roaming Right

Why would an urbanite care about Roaming Right? After all, urbanites are precisely the people who have forfeited Roaming Right in favor of obtaining all their life reproduction needs and enjoyment through the concentrated commodity market of the city, and by proximity to self-interested elite infrastructure. As Mike Davis and Cedric Johnson (2019) clarify, the cosmopolitan eschews the public. Relatedly, the condition of inequality-restoration urbanity, the engine of global monopoly capitalism, is the denial of capitalism’s reproductive dependence upon its sea of expropriation. A city is built on legalized, overlapping claims on future wealth creation, but the ingredients to that wealth creation are not exclusively to be found in the city.

Urban intellectuals and social workers recognize that denial extremely partially, as “gentrification.” Those who cannot live on 100% commodified life, the poor, are removed out of sight from the metropole. Yet at the same time, within and across borders, the tributary countryside is enclosed by global billionaires, and the people in that periphery are shoved to the smallholding margins, left without wealth, without access to fully-commodified life (which affordability, which wage-consumption urban economy depends on rural decommodifications, cheap inputs), or access to non-commodified life reproduction or enjoyment. They are expelled, set marching, set reeling. We admire how they’ve chosen us when they alight amongst us to serve us. Or we demand to speak to the manager. As in past Primitive Accumulation offensives, itinerancy is criminalized, and imperial militarization and an international for-profit carceral industry rages like a climate-crisis Firenado.

In this context, wouldn’t it be more natural, an efficient division of political labor, for urbanites to focus on getting Democrats (or Liberals or NDP) elected to office? Meanwhile urbanites can wait for deprived, low-density rural populations to organize their own solution to their desperate lives. After all, in those moments when those rural folks were organized and slightly-patronized by big owners (See Wilson 1976), they should have seen the limits of the inequality coalition…like wage-earning urbanites do? Something seems to be impeding organization. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s that massive surveillance, policing, and carceral apparatus (Johnson 2019).

Cities depend on tributaries for most of the raw materials of life bought on the urban market. As well, they depend on using the countryside as an urban waste sink. A pervasive lack of recognition of the non-autonomy of the city, urban commodity fetishism, including imagining the enjoyments–museums, libraries, bars and restaurants, dance venues, art galleries, theatres, orchestras, ballet troupes, poetry nights, etc.–as the sui generis private-collective property of the city, the lack of  conceptualization of how the cheap raw-material market goods come to appear in the city and how wastes disappear from the city, leads to pervasive political mis-analysis.

If cosmopolitans around the world want to stop being ruled by Donald Trump and like politicians, if they want to enjoy the free expression of their cosmopolitan merit, they need to use their geographic concentration as an organization asset to break down the marginalization, the peasantification of the countryside domestic and international, the remnant alignment between rural -tributary smallholders and global rentier capitalists–particularly in an unfree time in which those rentier capitalists are aggressively excluding rural settlers from enjoyable rural life and yet inequality, including tight metropole police exclusion of indigents, prohibits mass rural-urban mobility.

Artwork by Fernando Garcia-Dory & Amy Franceschini

As beholden as their enjoyment and their identities are to FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate capital) patronage and cheap commodity inputs and waste sinks, urbanites need to organize, to reconstruct a smallholder Red-Green alliance traversing the urban-rural divide, and taming private property right, as Swedes did at the turn of the Twentieth Century to establish an effective, semi-independent social democracy. Roaming Right is a great coalition vehicle for such a democratic realignment and legal revolution. City people should use their structurally-superior communication and organization capacity to reach out and help rural people–across race and gender–to secure–but not mine–the non-commodified world they need to live and enjoy themselves, through universal Roaming Right. Recognizing that the past half century of rural expulsions transcends national boundaries, Red-green political coalition could be the “close to home” foundation of internationalist capacity, rather than mere consumption cosmopolitanism.

 

You Are What You Enjoy: Identity, Alienation, & Inegalitarianism in Capitalism

TBD

 

Bibliography

 

Greens of British Columbia. 2017. “Weaver introduces Right to Roam Act.”

Ilgunas, Ken. 2018. This land is our land: How we lost the right to roam and how to take it. Plume Press.

Johnson, Cedric. 2019. “Black political life and the Blue Lives Matter Presidency.” Jacobin, February 17.

Turkewitz, J. 2019. “Who gets to own the West?” The New York Times, June 22.

Wikipedia. “Freedom to Roam.”

Wilson, William Julius. 1976. “Class conflict and segregation in the Postbellum South.” Pacific Sociological Review 19 (4): 431-446.

US Constitutional Dissent Briefs Toward Positive Liberty and Citizenship Rights

How the US might move, constitutionally, from formal-negative liberty to substantive-positive liberty is argued in the dissenting briefs of San Antonio Ind School District v. Rodriguez, 1973.

Universalized Private Property & Mobility: Symbolic Domination Duo

Marketing the “universalized private property” non-solution to the problems of inegalitarian unfreedom has been the worldwide political organization “stock in trade of mercantilists, capitalists, and the jurists and politicians beholden to them ever since the Roman republic” (David Abraham. 1996. “Liberty without Equality” Law & Social Inquiry 21(1): 7, citing Moore 1966 and Mayer 1971). Rousseau once argued that through obeying the General Will, we would all have property, in the state, iff no one had associational capacity (such as private property allocates). Capitalists argue that we have property in our alienable labour. Jefferson tried to define citizenship as a patrimony of 50 acre land ownership. Bourgeois revolutionaries from France to the US South have argued for the universalization of private property. It’s an idea that’s stunting and killing us. By Bush II, the “Ownership Society” was reduced to a requirement to obtain credit, or debt in order to access the conditions of life…universalizing the company mining town model, smallholder slavery to the capitalist class, prioritizing the social reproduction of the lending class, in its internal billionaire rivalry to own and direct the world.

The opposite of exclusive private property is inclusive public property, vilified by conservatives as the True trajectory of injustice, which they define via idealist philosophy, and its impoverished conceptualization of change, as decentering exception. Abraham traces the domination of the marketed non-solution in a history of US ideas and law. With this co-optative discursive strategy, “America’s greatest libertarians could be slaveholders, just as Europe’s were political-economy free marketeers,” Abrahams observes (11) in accordance with Losurdo 2011 (2006). Occasionally, usually after wars, equal protection/fundamental rights jurisprudence “chips away” at the negative-liberty polestar. “The logic and politics that each time ended the progress: a politics and logic” of universalized private property (9).

How can libertarianism remain twinned with slaver interest in the US? Abraham identifies geographic mobility as the necessary, co-optative factor greasing the relentless, little-challenged marketing of absolutist private property right as universal interest within the settler US (13). Yet in capitalism, private property is exclusive, accumulative, unequally allocating sovereign agency and collective action capacity, enhancing economic, social, and political inequality and unfreedom. Cosmopolitan mobility for the few, the ideal, rests upon the imposed, disruptive, depleting mobilization of the many—often war discharging people from citizenship and sovereign socio-material networks–home, Bourdieu said, where you are culturally literate, and by that able to navigate to your own interest, or through which you are symbolically dominated.

But a settler society, wherein freedom is allocated by market power and yet marketed as universal private property and glorified expulsion from home, is a society of vast and pervasive symbolic domination. We are required to black-box capitalism to presume, as political-economic elites have marketed since Cato the Elder in the 2nd c. BC, that citizenship rights, positive freedom, are irrelevant to non-elite liberty. Black-boxing capitalism, we can sink into the familiar, if degraded lullaby of Ownership Society marketing, aided by a sleeping pill: freedom’s idealistic reduction to physical mobility, as proposed by that original conservativizer of liberalism, Thomas Hobbes (1651). Enjoy the institutionalized Enclosure sweeps, and give my regards to your banker, your Master.

Liberal Fart of Freedom: Mobilizing populations

Liberal Fart of Freedom: Debt as Universal Private Property Ownership

Mobility freedom is subordinated to the Mill state’s global private property right protection obligation:

“But, then, in the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act passed on March 23, President Donald Trump not only reinstated the full amount but also added an additional $60 million, for a total of $510 million for the prison project.”

Mass incarceration:
“With 2.2 million people behind bars today and 11 million cycling through jails every year, the United States incarcerates more people, and at a drastically higher rate, than any other country in the world.

Building 1,200 more prison beds reflects our dependency on this system of racialized social control, revealing not only deeply held assumptions about crime and punishment, but also what we believe is possible for, and deserved in, rural America.” –Sylvia Ryerson & Judah Schept, 2018, “Building Prisons in Appalachia,” Boston Review.

Notes on Redoing Abraham:

1. Writing in 1996, Abraham did not yet realize how hard a Catholicized Supreme Court would be restoring absolute private property right in upcoming years. That can be updated.
2. His analysis of the poverty of negative liberty’s version of “autonomy,” choice, can be improved by contrasting choice, as delegated agency, to sovereign agency.
   1. We fear dependency (37) in absolute private property right regimes not because it is “entwined with collective action,” but because dependency is the denied condition within which all (except self-aggradizing property owners) make unfree choice. Within a law by, of, and for capitalists, most of our choices are non-sovereign, and we fear being called out. Anti-dependency discourse is a terrifying game of hot potato; the stakes are credit and cooperation.
   2. While the Pro-choice movement (footnote 120, p. 37) has conspicuously played by the pragmatist’s losing game, and, update, has lost massively by it within capitalism’s automated class warfare context, a subtle, thorough, and non-sexist analysis would also observe that social democracies and communist societies have, far more securely than liberal and of course conservative societies, recognized women’s right to reproductive sovereignty (see Baker & Ghodsee), because they recognize, behind the reproductive right, the societal value in the development of the woman, threatened by the high consequences of reproductive work for women’s lives in particular, particularly in commodified economies.
3. Analysis from his comparator case, West Germany, can be improved. Instead, to grasp socialist-influenced, positive-rights constitutional law, use Sweden.
   1. While the West German constitution excerpt (38) is a fine example, point out how the positive rights constitution is sociological, where the Anglo-American liberal negative rights constitution is anti-sociological.
   2. Attack the (rather-Jewish) reduction of social democracy to merely the reproduction of “homogeneity” (per Abraham, Friedman, etc.). See my critique of Jantelagen decontextualization and fetishization. Ethnic “homogeneity” (reduction of the salience of ethnicity) is socially (not discursively) constructed by an inclusionary sociological definition of society (per Dewey 1916), as where ethnicity is converted into political subcommunity, eg. in Vansterpartiet, or political-economic variation is incorporated, as with the Sami in the Swedish Constitution (Basic Laws). There’s a reason (genetic diversity, including incorporating some isolated, genetically-distinct communities–analogous to Ashkenazi Jews) why long-traveling Swedes “look weird,” as the idealistic Germans like to say. Swedes’ national ethnicity is an historical project of inclusion. Like non-ethnic difference and inequality, ethnicity is also a construction, one that extends outside a multicultural society; it isn’t just subcommunity. It is an alternative society, sometimes (particularly when in relation with capital) functional, and otherwise often ascribed, isolating, somewhat functional (capitalism outlaws working class organization) but not very. Universal celebrations of ethnicity in liberal, negative-liberty regimes are about abstracting functional ethnicity as the universal, non-White condition, and denying the functional servitude assigned to ascribed ethnicization within capitalism.
4. Ipsum lorem.

The Power and the Mediocrity of the Sign

In “What Americans Keep Ignoring about Finland’s School Success,” Anu Partanen reveals capitalist Anglo-America’s elephant-in-the-room-sized blind spot, why its focus on competition and “excellence” results in diminishing performance in order to promote concentrated power and idealism.

The Finns (Per Sahlberg) on education reform that demands accountability from teachers: “There is no word for accountability in Finnish. Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.” In Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.

The Finns (Samuli Paronen) on competition: “Real winners do not compete.” There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The driver of education policy in Finland is not competition amongst teachers and schools, policy forcing the ideal conservative conditions of bellum omnia contra omnes, but rather cooperation. School choice is not an issue, nor is putting education in the hands of the private sector and profit motive. This is in distinct contrast to America, Sahlberg observes, where “schools are a shop.”

The Finnish education reform goal was always equality and equity, never “excellence” or whatever conservative daydreams that word stands in for. “Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.” What the world dominated by conservative Anglo-american capitalist dogma still cannot face is that it is equality that most efficiently produces star performances and substantive excellence.

Tiger Moms’ genius boys in Shanghai and Singpore can put in 20-hour days of rote memorization and exhaustive cramming, and only manage to approximate in performance the Finnish children who are simply well cared for and supported by valued, independent, unionized teachers and their egalitarian society. Surely, the East Asian genius boys are better poster boys for conservative capitalist discipline; but just as surely they are inefficient…and 99% of these memorizers and crammers will never be able to write a non-plagiarized essay, that is, communicate independently, like humans can.

Why does egalitarianism more efficiently make excellence? The answer is right in front of our nose, right in front of our blind spot. It’s because in the inequality tradition, poor people are overwhelmingly, structurally prevented from attaining their human potentials, and, a factor that perversely torments conservative theorists much more, the rich enjoy the comfort of knowing that surrounded by throngs of shackled “competitors,” they can enjoy many a good old slack.

In such a conservative culture, it is the appearance and ideal of excellence that matters, because the sign unmoored is directed by and justifies power. To be chosen is a sign, necessarily imposed upon the material world. The grim “play” of signs, only ordered by the mystified, atopic distribution of power in a reified collective imagination (a world not made but given, or made by all because you cannot choose unfreely), is Anglos’ obsession, and the more people you can induce to submit to this obsession, the more human life chances are allocated by market power and the more absolutely necessary capitalism (or its feudal and slavery complements)  is for any life chance at all.

At or adhered to central nodes of global capitalist accumulation, Anglo-Americans are altogether too kind, too attentive to, too solicitous of the promotional, the unmoored sign, constantly mistaking it for the legitimate, autarkic limits of knowable (meta)reality. Our literature, for one example, is far too ready to believe that the con man is the true knower.

Primitive Accumulation, Negative Externalities and Growth

Over the years, Stefano Bartolini has modeled economic growth, showing that whereas most models of economic growth feature accumulation and technical progress as engines of growth, a third engine is needed to ensure self-perpetuating economic growth. History, the theory of Polanyi & Hirsch, and Bartolini’s models all suggest that third engine is two negative externalities that combine to drive growth: 1) positional externalities, and 2) externalities that reduce social and natural capital. As we see when we contrast national accounts and GDP (Piketty 2020), economic growth has costs.

Thus, the third pillar of economic growth, negative externalities, is inherently irrational, and while immediately destructive of some people and Earthly ecologies, it’s not anodyne “creative destruction”. As it unfolds over time, it can also be economically-destructive, counterproductive. Economic growth is thus a limited good; it cannot be considered an unalloyed, ultimate virtue, and it must be critically managed.

In steering economic development, responsible governance would identify and account for these negative externalities. It may well be that only via dominating destruction, via military means, do capitalist financial cores, and rentier capitalists, win in a game in which the goal, economic growth, proliferates costs.

Positional externalities:

Pagano 1999 defined a positional good: consumption by an individual of a positive amount of a positional good involves the consumption of an equal negative amount by someone else. Power and status are fundamental positional goods; others include education and housing.  The positional goods/services/externalities theoretical tradition extends from Veblen 1899/1934 and Hirsh 1976. In addition to Bartolini, Robert H. Frank (“Falling Behind”) has continued to explore this tradition as well as Bowles and Park 2002, Schor 1998, and Corneo and Jeanne 2001.

Externalities that reduce social and natural capital:

“Industrial revolutions are the paradigmatic example of this (Growth as Substitution) mechanism: they are the most striking processes of labor supply and accumulation increase because they are the most striking processes of social and environmental devastation recorded by economic history” (Stefano Bartolini, “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth.” 2003: 9).

Williamson 1995, Krugman 1995, and Bartolini et al have shown that the transition to an industrial economy has always been associated with explosive growth in the labor force participation rate.

Such growth-propelling negative externalities are discussed within the Marxist tradition as primitive accumulation. To further explore: The relationship between primitive accumulation and other capitalist strategies of promoting profit-restoring growth to the point of increasing contradiction / social and environmental irrationality.

Bartolini’s growth-model can explain the failure of conservative economics’ predicted relationship between growth and happiness (Bartolini 2003). Inter alia, political scientist Lane 2000 shows that American growth is not associated with increased happiness.