Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption - that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
If you look at things over the long term, there are a range of secular trends common to most developed states (and part of the problem with less developed states and the process of post-colonial state formation is that there’s a sort of recipe for what a state does that might be very difficult to replicate in the absence of the conditions of its possibility). The British liberal state of the 19th century managed to govern with a tiny civil service - departments of state such as the Exchequer used to employ only around 20 or 30 people as recently as the 1860s. The vast amount of state employees were in the military, with the post office a distant second. Government - to the degree that there was government - was devolved to largely amateur institutions, and government didn’t do very much. Historically, European states spent almost all their revenue on war and defence. From the late 19th century onwards, there has been a constant trend upwards - and outwards into civil society - but even the “advanced liberalism” of Lloyd George in his guise as a reforming Chancellor only had a footprint, if you like, of around 15% of GDP. It’s also important to underline the fact that much of the increase in state expenditure was driven from below - from a more active and more enfranchised citizenry.
The significance of the “crisis of governability” of the 1970s was the conclusion drawn that the public sector had reached its limits. At around the same time, democratic socialists in Britain - and Australia though we didn’t really have the debate here in the same terms - began to lose their sense of forward momentum and any sense of socialism as transformative. Thatcher, as I’ve suggested, in many instances strengthened the reach and power of the state - “big state conservatism” or liberalism is no new thing. It didn’t spring into being with Bush or Howard, as an examination of the records of Reagan and Fraser would indicate.
But nevertheless it does make sense to talk about neoliberalism. If it’s true that there are strong secular forces shaping the size and the state in a certain direction, it’s also true that attempts to reorient the scope and direction of the state’s activity are important, even if they don’t actually practice the anti-statism they preach. After all the construction of a market economy - embodying the precepts of possessive individualism - was not just a victory of certain social formations and their ruling ideas over others but also a project which required a massive expansion of the reach if not initially the size of the state - in order to overturn notions of a moral economy and to facilitate the transformation of both work in the direction of free labour and of factors of production as tradeable, among other things. It’s what Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”. Much of the trend from the mid 19th century onwards was to further expand the state’s reach and scope through transferring activities in the economy from private to public governance. The last few decades have been about turning that around - in a way. But this has also required both a further expansion in the reach of the state and a self-imposed restraint which has proceeded under the sign of globalisation.
Incidentally, my argument elsewhere has been that globalisation is horribly confused as a social scientific concept - it tends to conflate far too many processes, suggest a unilinear direction where things are a lot more complex, and mistake effects for causes. But the mistaking of effects for causes - a characteristic of neoliberal globalisation talk (”there is no alternative”) - is itself deeply ideological. What is clustered under the name of globalisation does, and is intended by at least some actors, to do work in the world. In short, it’s an ideological rather than an analytical concept, and its force is such that it attains facticity.
It’s wrong to think of any political ideology either as a “coherent system of ideas” (the polsci 101 definition) or as only oriented towards the size of the state or the degree to which the state dominates “the commanding heights of the economy” or seeks to set market forces free. That’s partly because political ideas are often parasitic on and subsequent to forms of rule and techniques of governing, as it were, and partly because, sociologically, I don’t think you can make a meaningful distinction between the ideas and the institutions and individuals who are their “carriers” - as Max Weber would say.
Just as the state is better understood as an assemblage of institutions embedded within society and reflecting many of the conflicts and tensions within the social body than as some sort of monolith confronting “civil society”, so too ideologies are woven from a whole variety of cloths for a whole range of reasons. They’re as much about weird and misguided shadow boxing in the op/ed pages over the fetish of Hayek as about any abstract theoretical wonkery. There’s no “essence” of liberalism, or of socialism for that matter. Some ideologies have a closer articulation to reason - because they’re understood in terms of reason not necessarily because they are reasonable - than others. The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason. But it’s as unreasonable to compare “Soviet Marxism” to some ethereally pure and ideal Marx, whose texts are incredibly complex and often contradictory. But let’s be fair here - there’s no “classical liberalism” either which is entirely amenable to rational redaction.
In many instances, what we’re doing when we talk about ideologies is textual analysis. Modern political philosophy is far more akin to textual criticism and hermeneutics than it sometimes thinks. It’s a technique of ordering texts - confused, complex and intriguing texts - and giving them a shape and a coherence they lack. It’s also an atemporal and ahistorical enterprise - acting as if liberalism is The Two Treatises on Civil Government or communism is Capital or the Grundrisse. In actuality, these texts are inseparable from their contexts, both historical and in terms of the work they are made to do as lodestars or fetishes of subsequent or concurrent practices. An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.
Ideologies, in short, are what ideologies do.
Ideology is also the will to govern, and how that will seeks to embody itself in steering the ship of state. It embodies a particular (ideal) relation between state and citizens.
It can be useful to use some of the ideas about and from ideologies and the arguments for political analysis, but only if we remember that at best what we’re talking about are ideal types. The world of politics is far far messier than any ideological prescription. As is policy.
Where we can reasonably argue that there is meaning in what we say is where we can identify a general orientation - and which forces have a sense of movement and momentum behind them. The big problem social democracy has is that it’s lost any sense that there is a coherent project. It’s lost any sense of working on the world to transform it.
Neoliberalism has both.
But neither has the coherence that their adherents - or many analysts - might think.
But what matters is that people think they do - it’s a truth effect in Foucault’s terms or a social fact in Durkheim’s. And there are still meaningful distinctions to be made - but they’re often to be found in the nature of the rhetoric and the framing of problems and the underlying assumptions rather than false propositions such as “if a state is bigger than x% of the economy it’s social democratic”. Most important are the effects ideologies create on thought and action, and people’s material circumstances, and in what they enable and what they constrain. All of those are somewhat artificial distinctions analytically, but they’re useful. What we should be looking at is how they frame that object called “society” and what principles they use to manipulate it and how they divide it up, how they create friends and enemies. It’s this sense in which concepts like “aspirationalism” and “social justice” - or “transparent information” - become imbued with both meaning and the capacity to be mobilised to do stuff.
And their ethical commitments are vital.
Elsewhere: Another segue from Jacques Chester at Troppo.
Social democracy can be distinguished from libertarian socialism by the litmus test of the state. And if democratic-socialism moves too far from libertarianism
( broadly defined) then it begins to flirt with authoritarian-socialism.
Everything for the state and everything in the state.
Now, yes there are two primary conceptions of the state. One militarist and reactionary and the other welfarist and progressive. One backward - one forward.
It follows from this rough and ready analysis that democratic-socialism has a great future as the default economic and political position PROVIDED that it doesn’t go to extremes. Either far too statist ( or Marxist) or far too libertarian in the sense that it neglects the commons or the safety net.
I’d tentatively suggest that the term “began to lose their sense of forward momentum” requires some clarification.
It seems from the context that you mean that in 1970s democratic socialists had a crisis of confidence about the desirability of their project.
Or perhaps, though less likely, you mean that democratic socialists ceased to be successful in convincing the electorate of their project.
It hardly needs to be stated that these two states of affairs are not mutually exclusive. Indeed one may strengthen the other.
Yet, to clarify your account of this important moment, it is perhaps necessary to explain the process by which the crisis of social democracy became manifest.
“Neoliberalism has both.”
On the contrary, I think neoliberalism as a transformative project has been dead for a decade or so in the English speaking world at least. What has replaced it has been a managerialist regime which is still inclined to a neoliberal view of the world, and to neoliberal policy innovations, but is stuck with the task of managing a social democratic state.
The bizarre resistance to any action on global warming we see on the right is in part an unwillingness to accept that the policy initiative has been lost. The idea that an emissions trading scheme is a stalking horse for socialism is silly of course, but climate change certainly doesn’t fit with the 1990 world view.
John, I disagree for the reasons given in the post. Basically I think you’re taking a too optimistic view of what constitutes a “social democratic state” and taking the neoliberals’ own statements too seriously, and also eliding neoliberalism with “the right”.
Katz - lack of faith in their own project. I’ll come back to both answers later when I have more time.
Is it just me or is this post just a high brow way of saying pure ideologies never work and we just cherry pick the best of each of them?
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Interesting post Mark. Have to say that this:
Might need a little elucidation. After all the laissez-faire approach that Adam Smith advocated actually began to be applied in real life from this time. Up until the 19th century Britain was protectionist.
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But anyway.
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I had a look thru Fukuyama’s book After the Neocons. I was amused to see that Fukuyama goe to great lengths to explain the intellectual heritage of the Neoconservative movement. It reminds me of Marxists who goes to great lengths to distance themselves from the nasty business of Communist states. In short both Fukuyama and Marxists are saying: we didn’t want it to be this way.
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If as you say ideologies are what ideologies do then some leather patched kindly old Marxist writing tomes about working class history in some English village is as responsible for the Ukrainian famine, the Cultural revolution, the killing fields and so forth as those who were there and did that. Is Nietzsche responsible for Hitler?
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I’d say no.
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Instead I’d argue that you must understand ideological architecture as, like conventional architecture, consisting of various parts: some applied, some theoretical. There’s a body of work - the theory - which says A,B and C and by the conventions of classification may be grouped from inside or without as Ideology X. Then there’s the actual political consequences of ideology X when it is taken up by political agents and applied in the real world.
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Political agents have to deal with whatever contingency they’re dealt and therefore must morph the theory to suit themselves. Hence Lenin decides that a few months of Capitalism is enough to begin the Socialist project. In doing this he both ignores one of the vital arguments that Marx deploys and condemns the Russian people to a century of autocracy which differs from the Tsarian tyranny only in that it is much worse in most ways and a bit better in others.
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Well done Vlad.
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Likewise the Nazis take up Nietzsche, already co-opted by anti-Semites via his sister, and basically get him wrong all the way down the line.
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What we see when political agents take up the work of writers is that, time and again, they are selective about what they use and what they don’t. How Pol Pot’s repatriation of city dwellers to the countryside, for example, is in any way compatible with Marxian economics is beyond me. But Pol Pot identified as Marxist. He just didn’t get it.
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The third step to the creation of ideology is propaganda. This is an over-simplistic articulation of various notions by professionals with a view to creating a secular ideology. The secular ideology then becomes in effect the ideology. So in respect to Hayek it’s devolved into this attitude that anyone advocating state regulation of any sort is a ’socialist’ which is the the modern equivalent of ‘witch’. That is: inherently nefarious with no redeeming characteristics and nothing but evil intent.
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This misses the context of, say, The Road To Serfdom which was written in the context of widely endorsed state control. Hayek dedicated the book to socialists. It also allows people like George Bush to crap on about ‘freedom’ when in effect what he is doing is practicing a highly corrupt style of corporatism aimed at enriching the industrial groups with which he’s associated. It’s Tammany Hall Fascism - with elections sorta.
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Of course that doesn’t mean that those on the Left should feel exonerated. The Left is just as, if not more, prone to practice secular theology as the Right. What lies behind these secular theologies are vested interests. And these interests only advocate whatever suits them. It should be made clear that such vested interests are not restricted to the powerful but indeed are all over the place. They will use ideologies, think tanks, polemics and whatever else if it suits them.
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Mr Murdoch, for example, who praises laissez-faire economics might suddenly switch to a more ’social democratic’ position if the government decided to actually foster an open media market and not just tailor legislation to suit News Ltd’s creeping monopoly.
¶¶¶, Adrien, for goodness’ sake.
Even if it’s true that as Mark says, social democratic thinkers have lost any sense of an achievable programme, at least few social democrats or democratic socialists spend time in angst over historical blame, the way you seem to, and the way the cultural warriors of the 1990s seem to.
History is for historians, public policy is for politicians. Let’s not cross the streams.
Speaking from personal experience, Liam?
Liam I am not angsting over historical blame. I’m simply augmenting MArk’s argument that ideologies are all about the results of the agency of said ideologies. Ideologies are as they do. The discourse of various cultural warriors is to win points against the opposition by representing them as ‘evil’. This social-democrats are to be tarred with the Commie brush just as conservatives have been tarred with the Nazi brush.
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The effect of this is to bolster up the faithful in their assured faith that the politically different are not humans with a different perspective. In fact they aren’t humans at all.
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As for conflating history and policy, was it Cicero who said that to ignore history is to remain perpetually a child. The Marxist adventures should at least tell us something about the possible consequences of all-encompassing ideological frameworks yes. A lesson that could be applied to, say, the Neocons as well. Lesson #1 for ideologues: You Are Wrong!
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The Social-Democrats ran aground in the 70s for exactly the same reason the laissez-faire advocates ran aground in the 30s. Please see Lesson #1 for explanation.
I think Pol Pot was largely unaware of Marx’s analysis, but was mightily impressed by the rigid, doctrinaire ideologues of the French CP he read while studying in France in the early 50s. A good biography by Philip Short, “Pol Pot - The History of a Nightmare” argues his convincingly. I think, possibly, earlier writers went looking for Marxism in Pol Pot - and his regime certainly spouted phrases that sounded a bit Marxish, or a bit commo. But Pol Pot was mainly into autocratic power; he wore his communism lightly, I think.
Lesson #2: an intricate exposition/analysis of a professed ideology may be as misleading as the person professing intended it to be, a red herring so to speak: official (state) ideology as a mask and cloak.
Fukuyama, Fuk u.
I’m with Liamista.
Liam, there is no alternative!
I reckon most Marxists are about as aware of what Marx said as most Christians are of what Jesus said, as in not very.
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The Communist movement stems from Marx’s writing and his activism (which in my opinion contradicts his thesis). Ergo Communism is a political agency of Marxian theory, no way around it. The fact that the practice varies from the theory is illustrative of human beings and the way we do things.
Naah, Adrien, you haven’t been reading the post.
Marx had all sorts of incompatible political prescriptions, analyses, and strategies, loosely interlinked. Not a “coherent system of ideas” or “Marxian theory”.
And he attached himself to existing movements, and didn’t found one.
I’m well aware that Marx regarded his work as a failure. He thought of it in terms of Balzac’s story “The Unfinished Masterpiece” in which an artist with a brilliant vision struggles and fails to render it, producing instead a mess. However, despite the contradictions and the failures of such theoretical positions as ’surplus value’ or the notion that wages would keep falling, I don’t believe you can go so far as to say that Marx’s writings are only loosely linked.
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The contradiction between his thesis and his activism - which was limited but vital - is that Marx’s theory was essentially anti-humanist. He pointed out, I think correctly, that the political systems available to people are dependent on the economic mode of production which supports it. Hence a liberal-democracy would not be possible, say, in a society which requires the vast bulk of its population to remain on the land and to work it from a very early age until death. Similarly as I read him the emergence of socialism could only be made possible after capitalism has run its course. Therefore why would you, at the beginning of capitalist society, engage in any political activism when according to your own theories this is useless?
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History contradicts Marx’s monolithic views somewhat: Engels established the 2nd International after his death, Lenin took this a step further. The results we know did have an effect. However they did not put paid to capitalism.
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My original comment here tho’ is not about that so much as challenging the assertion that ideologies are as they do. There’s a procedure to ideology, this includes agency, theory and propaganda. The process can turn a theory into the living embodiment of its opposite. Having learned this lesson the hard way I don’t think its conscionable for us to make these sorts of mistakes again.
Marx anti-humanist, Adrien? Ever read the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844″?
No Kim. I haven’t. So?
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You can’t argue that Marx’s writings are “incompatible political prescriptions, analyses, and strategies, loosely interlinked” and not a “coherent system of ideas” on the one hand and then on the other try and challenge the conventional view of Marx as anti-humanist, along with Nietzsche and Freud - the anti-humanist, on the basis of one of his bits of esoterica.
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Anti-humanism of course is an hyperbolous nomenclature perhaps contrahumanism might be better.
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In any event it has no bearing on my point that Marx’s philosophy of economic and political evolution was apparently contradicted by his participation in socialist activity.
Marx’ early work was very humanist, Adrien. “Species being” and all that.
Sorry, too tired today to respond to the rest!
Now young Emma don’t trouble your pretty head with things you don’t understand.
Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General (his third Manuscript) clearly shows him to be an anti-humanist, or as Adrien prefers, a contrahumanist.
Best you stick with whatever Jane Austen novel is on your grade 12 english class curriculum.
We read Althusser in Grade 12 English, GregM, so we know there’s a counter argument to that! This will be on the final exam.
After all, the high schools r full of postmodern marxistz.
Marx as a humanist, and Marxist humanism:
http://www.uq.net.au/slsoc/manussa/MarxHum.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/index.htm
http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/
Reading Althusser in Year 12 English? Amazing.
Althusser didn’t write in English. His writings could not in any way be described as literature. He was insane.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the old bugger. My modest thesis on some text of his (the name of which is now lost in the mists of my memory) got me first class honours in politcal sociology. It also led me to the conclusion that Marxism is a religion with all the cults and controversies and heresies and poring over obscure texts in order to find revelation of the divine will that you would have found in third century Christianity.
Tell me though. Did your year 12 Science class give Creationism a run? They may as well have. That’s based on religion too.
That was a joke GregM. Of course I wasn’t taught Althusser in high school English.
It’s Tammany Hall Fascism - with elections sorta.
Excellent summary of republican government. It (the governance model adopted by the republicans) also clearly demonstrates just how corrupt, authoritarian and essentialy anti democratic, corporate dominated political movements really are, and why a strong state in a polity where an organised working class has been litigated and legislated out of existence, is a threat to democracy both at home and abroad.
I take it that your bit about reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 was a joke too. I have read them. What turgid garbage. Reading them left me wondering whether Marx was as crazy as Althusser. He probably was.
“An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.”
What I think is being put forward here by Mark is a way of thinking about political ideologies in a sociological way - as these big assemblages that cross between texts and contexts, that can be registered as meaningful as such rather than being constantly evaluated on the basis of their adherence to the letter of their various texts. You’re kind of staking out a terrain for a political sociology, then?
So, when applied to the discussion about neoliberalism, to evaluate its prominence etc we can’t just make a check-list from the texts - a set of either/ors that would render this or that government ‘neoliberal’ - but have to think about it as this kind of assemblage. Am I following?
It sure sounds convincing.
Greg M -
Oooh nasty. Bitch bitch bitch
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Kim after grade 12 english class - We read Althusser in Grade 12 English
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N’uk.
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It’s good for you that’s a joke. Austen’s way more important than Althusser’s ever gonna be. He’s not useless but he’s over-rated. Probably didn’t read Austen either? I read Ionesco and Le Carre. Is that bad? Would the blue and green factions of the Great Culture Wars please confer and declare their policy. Please?
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Am I being dragged down by an irrelevant tradition performed by Dead White Males (well Cornwall’s not dead is he): Or - am I the victim of this nefarious postmodern Neo-Gramscian conspiracy to make everyone believe that Western Culture is inherently oppressive and meaningless.
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I’m so confused.
Klaus K, yes!
GregM, it might be “turgid garbage” to you but that’s a cop out when it comes to assessing the question of whether or not Marx’ early work has a humanist component, and there’s a very long lineage of work which suggests it does - from Lukacs and Korsch in the 1920s onwards. So we’re hardly talking “one bit of esoterica”.
Kim’s joke about Althusser I suspect refers to the fact that Althusser was notorious for suggesting that there was a “break” between early and later Marx and that the early humanist work needed to be discarded in the interests of “science”. Now very few people read Althusser on Marx these days, and perhaps with good reason, but probably largely because the “problematic” he was intervening in has disappeared with Eurocommunism. I’d suggest (tongue only half in cheek) that GregM and Adrien are still haunted by Althusser’s ghost in characterising Marx as an “anti-humanist”.
I think we’d need at least a working definition of “humanism” to make much sense out of these arguments. I don’t think it’s a particularly precise concept. Adrien’s reference to Nietzsche and Freud brings in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and here I suspect Foucault is the unspoken reference.
But if someone who wants to talk about “humanism” and “anti-humanism” could explain what they mean by those terms, then I think we might have the basis for a discussion.
Klaus please forgive but that perception is classic ivory tower.
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Politics involves a lot of people doing scores of mostly banal things in furtherance of winning and retaining office. Their talk is mostly viz getting things done. When they speak of politics in the abstract they focus on loyalty to the group, hatred for one’s opponents and forming alliances.
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Texts do come into it. Any effective political movement has its brain trust. These people hang out in the backroom. There’s an aliterate phrase for them that’s now out of date.
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But the strategic cog of a political organization will think mostly in terms of a competetive game: actually war. This game is particularly hot come election time but it never stops. The members of this cog will read texts but many of them will be of immediate utility to their lives - polemics on and by others such as themeselves - political agents.
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If you look up one of those ‘political test’ sites they all deploy a variation on the Pournelle chart. Most of the leaders of the world will appear in the top-right hand corner. As in economically liberal (sorta) yet firmly socially authoritarian. There are a few leaders in the hippie box (bottom-left hand) like Ghandi for example. The really bad guys - Mugabe, Stalin, Hitler are in the top left hand box, go figure.
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The point is mainstream leaders are usually authoritarian. Labor, Liberal, Democrat, Republican. Blair, Rudd, Clinton, Roosevelt, Reagan, Thatcher, Hawke - all of them. The people who will lead nations are of a very specific type no matter their variations in style or policy preference. They would rule and believe that it is good for them to do so. That they succeed is testimony to their success at the political game.
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Texts are optional. They’ve got people for texts. What they do is the rousing speech, the stern attitude to ‘injustice’, the warm handshake, the beguiling smile, the hand on the hilt of a blade you can’t see. The capacity to decide on behalf of millions. The political intelligentsia will be represented on any politician’s staff. Politicians don’t want their ignorance exposed, they’ll look the fool.
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But for such persons thinking too deeply is a liability. They see the angles and play them. That’s how they think. Their attitude to policy is: will it make me look good, and will it work (that is will I get re-elected).
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Political intellectuals play Concillieri. Every now and then one of them actually slips a good idea into the process. Sometimes it even gets up. Sorta.
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Interestingly enough the Ghandi box is crowded with the famously successful of a different profession - http://www.politicalcompass.org/composers
Adrien, but you’re missing the point here. The parsing of Hayek and so on is part of it all. It’s largely illusory but it’s part of the political game. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s got nothing to do with an “ivory tower” perspective - I regard a lot of the endless exegesis of the texts of the canon of the political philosphers as in great part a waste of time. But we have to think of what uses they’re put to - why do the UK Tories think, for instance, that they need some sort of coherent ideological doctrine?
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/08/31/have-the-tories-embraced-progressive-fusionism/
On Marx’s humanism and anti-humanism.
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Yes Marx was a humanist in his youth. But his important contribution was made later in life - post Darwin. Along with Freud and Nietzsche, Marx criticized the humanist project which took as its central ideal - the Rational Human. Each of these three showed that there are limits to this aspect of ourselves. Darwin made this very clear - we are animals. Many have known this, it’s obvious after all, but the 19th century had inherited centuries of self-deluding hooey designed to con us otherwise.
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Nietzsche reminded us that all we call higher culture is based on cruelty. Marx illustrated well that, despite the claims of humanists post-1789, higher culture is still based on such. He understood that our liberty is limited by our economic capabilities. That the political systems available to us will be limited and defined by our way of winning our daily bread, weekly videos and annual holidays.
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History deals us a hand and there’s only so much we can do. This thesis appears to me to be central. However ironically it was the Marxists who disregarded it. They, in Hobsbawm’s wistful words, attempted to leap-frog history.
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Marx, like Freud, wrote a a lot of hooey. He indulged in prophecy, he ignored inconvenient data (the wages are rising stupid), but his central theses is sound. Like the Marxists, Freud’s disciples for some reason disgarded the wheat and munched on the chaff. That’s the trouble with Great Thinkers. People worship them and totally fail to see the point.
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The humanist project assumed a certain rational, enlightened path to human improvement. Marx obviously believed in the betterment of Humanity. In that he was a humanist. But his criticism of Enlightenment assumptions makes him an Anti-Humanist as well. For want of a better phrase.
Mark -
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I’m not missing the point I’m reiterating it. You’ve been a politicakl agent you know what I’m talking about. As I’ve said the political intelligensia is necessary. They come in handy especially at times when you need something to believe in.
The classification is a little hyperbolous. Humanism is a movement that originated in the late-Middle Ages associated with a resurgence in interest in the antique Greco-Roman view of the Human Subject as an art object. In contradiction to Christian eschatologists they believed humans were ‘works of wonder’ and that human civilization could be improved towards perfection using reason.
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This view morphed over the next few centuries and by the late 18th century became almost cult-like. It was by then associated with science, the nobility of commerce, representative government and seperation of powers - bourgeois political philosophy - above all the Sovereign Individual.
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Anti-humanism criticizes the assumptions at play here. I prefer Contrahumanism because the aims and values of Humanism are actually endorsed by many so-called anti-Humanists. The Germanic Gang of Three all precipitated an avalanche of Enlightenment critiques. This has finally produced the confused, semantics-obsessed melange known spuriously as postmodernism.
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Ironically most ‘postmodernists’ are unaware that they’re simply hairsplitting the GGT. They’ve also missed the point that in each case the critique of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is based on facing the fact that we are animals - post Darwin. Man is a rope strung twixt Ape and Superman n’ all that.
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Foucault does not bear on my argument at all, Mark. And it’s not in the least bit hermeneutical. Foucault mixed up Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. Unlike most of his contemporaries he didn’t entirely miss the point. Except for the one about us being animals.
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You’d think after 2 World Wars we’d a learnt that Roussaeu was full of shit. But no….
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If I wanna discuss the technocrat deployment of implicit power I’ll bring up Foucault. He’s good for speaking of bureaucracy in all its wonders. In The History of Ideas he’s a mere footnote, a paragraph at best.
Hmmm, Adrien, but you’re writing a genealogy of humanism not trying to specify it as a concept. From what you’ve written, it might be possible to conclude that Marx was a “contrahumanist” but not with any degree of precision. If you want to give it some analytical force, rather than tracing its use, then we can talk!
You’re being a bit too Foucauldian, dude!
And there’s an echo of his “death of Man”…
Size of the ’state’ as %ge of GDP is a pretty bald measure.
Eg. If Howard churned lots of tax dollars into transfer payments to middle class families, that hardly represents big govt or social democracy. Nor in my books, does beefing up the nightwatchman arms of the state (eg fattening the military or Laura Norder).
“Klaus please forgive but that perception is classic ivory tower.”
I was restating what I understood to be the argument in Mark’s post. Personally, I need time to catch up and try to figure out what’s being said, and some of its implications, before arguing for or against the specific points, especially when it’s well outside of my area of expertise.
Klaus, I very much appreciate the effort taken to engage with the post itself.
Going way back up the thread, I’m still thinking about Katz’ question. I was interested to read a review of Bob Carr’s Great Books book, in which apparently he claims that social democracy is dead, and he wishes he’d been an FDR Democrat. This might say a lot more about Carr himself and the dessicated NSW right at least in its more pretentious incarnations than about any force that the ideologies of the left still have, but it actually put me in mind of Stalin - whether or not he believed the stuff he wrote in his “theoretical” work is perhaps unknowable, but it’s certainly true that from the purges and show trials on, there were no “Marxists” left in the hierarchy and apparat of the Soviet Union who had anything other than a nominal belief in their ostensible guiding ideas.
I think here a lot of the “ideologies do this” discussion is simply wrong. We’d have a much better chance of understanding what happened in the 20th century with all its horrors if we saw state violence and its social supports as the common denominator. Another review I was reading today referred to a German plan to kill 50 million people in the Ukraine and Russia during WW2. And “liberal” states aren’t innocent either. The futility of attempting to make political points out of horrors actually demonstrates that we’re on the wrong turf. State violence, I strongly suspect, is actually the independent variable, with ideological formations and various other social factors being intervening variables.
Hence, Adrien, I’m just not convinced by the analytical schema that tries to extrapolate from something in Marx’ texts to a particular form of rule. There’s a lot more that’s very contingent, and there are a lot more continuities in terms of state forms with other historical regimes that were not “Marxist”.
Btw, on the point about Smith, I’d suggest reading Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The British state had to do an awful lot of work to bring about “property rights” and all the other antecedents of economic liberalism.
Mark, I hate to be impolite* but Marx was a nutter. There is no merit in scouring through his works to find their true meaning. That’s what my study of Althusser taught me. And in fairness to Althusser I didn’t know that he was barking mad when I studied him.
* The exception is on Germaine Greer. I will be as impolite to her as I want to be .But I understand that I have been censored on that, whatever my strongly held and justified feelings. However it’s your site so I resspect that.
I agree with Saloth Sar STF on Aug 29th:
“Lesson #2: an intricate exposition/analysis of a professed ideology may be as misleading as the person professing intended it to be, a red herring so to speak: official (state) ideology as a mask and cloak.”
Pol Pot was mainly about exercising power. Mark discusses this factor on Aug 31st at 10.41pm; though the form of the “state” under Khmer Rouge rule was eccentric to say the least. I think Mark hits a nail squarely on the head to suggest that “professed ideoloogy” is a minor factor for many political regimes. “1984″ is grotesque, but isn’t that one of its themes?
Picking over the details and nuances of an officuial state ideology may be uninfirmative. What then, analysts? Actual policies and practices. But how to discover them? Pol Pot’s Kampuchea was closed off, but did broadcast incessant official statements. North Korea, relatively closed off. Peru’s Shining Path areas - closed off. Eastern Europe under Soviet rule - more open, but generally operated misleading official sources.
For Khmer Rouge Kampuchea, a lone Catholic priest Ponchaud nailed the main factual outline, by i) speaking Khmer, ii) analysing the tone of official broadcasts, iii) being aware of stories from refugees fleeing Khmer Rouge ‘liberated zones’ long before the fall of Phnomh Penh in April 1975; noting the desperation of refugees in the capital in the final months before its fall, not to be captured by KR, iv) interviewing refugees after KR rule began.
And Noam Chomsky, in his typical dismissive, quibbling, credulous manner cast doubt on Ponchaud’s methodology and cast far less doubt on the KR view. To his discredit. I think Chomsky’s main error was to be blinkered by ideology. It’s not uncommon. Marx didn’t spawn Pol Pot, though Mao’s legacy may have had a direct influence.
cheerio
Mark says:
I made the same point more than five years ago, although Alan Kohler beat me to it and put it much better than I ever could.
Those on the other side of the political spectrum (eg Kevin Rudd) will try to the same tactic in negative image ie talk Left but tack Right, particularly on cultural matters.
This is an example of what Mickey Kaus calls cross-wired politics, when parties steal each others ideological clothes in a duplicitous form of me-tooism.
We see it in AUS too. Keating outflanked the LN/P to the liberal Right on deregulating markets. Then Howard outflanked the ALP to the “corporal” Left on gun control. Thats telling median voters that “Hey, I am not a puppet to the special interests in my own party”.
This leads to both major parties converging to the populist Centre, albeit from opposite directions. That is the psepho-logic behind my Great Convergence theory (shameless plug).
I’m reminded of accounts in Christopher Clark’s history of Prussia of atrocities performed by Christian forces for example the Swedes during the Thirty Years War.
mark says:
A tendency towards populist statism in both emerging and mature states lơoks almost inevitable. The main problem is the transparency and equity of such institutional moves.
THe imperatives of both political demand and exigencies of policy supply are driving this, as Schumpeter & Downs brilliantly predicted so long ago.
In part the statist trend is due to populist politics. The Left supports the low-status, whether workers, poor, women, gays, trees etc. The populace are, by definition, (S-E) lower-status than the elite. So the extension of franchise will tend to shift the psephological spectrum to the statist (not culturalist!) Left.
But a very large part of the statist trend is simply the secular tendency to bigger, wealthier jurisdictions. Statist community service provision benefits from economies of scale, esp relating to monopsonistic purchasing power.
Public goods relating to human capital accumulation, such as health and higher education, also tend to be superior goods. The demand for them shows significant income elasticity.
So richer, older boomers and their spawn will want Bigger Government to dig into someone elses pockets to provide services keeping their minds and bodies in working order.
Also, less developed nations may often tend to ramp up the state provisioning sector in order to super-charge economic development. Gerschenkron’s famous relative backwardness thesis still has some merit, properly adjusted for native intellectual capacities:
This is almost the reverse of Marx’s thesis. Marx believed it was the rich countries which would tend towards statism.
In fact both Gerschenkrohn and Marx had good points. Poorer countries tend to minimise their publicly-distributed welfare state and maximise their publicly-owned wealthfare state. Richer countries reverse the signs for that formula. Lots of welfare handouts to noisy special interests whilst the family silver gets flogged off.
That is the Strocchiverse take on economic evolution, FWIW.
I don’t know about that. When we think of genocide, the standout thread linking them all is the ideology of socialism. True, state power is crucial, by definition. But without socialist ideology, most probably would not have taken place.
But that’s completely untrue, Roger. How was “socialism” implicated in Rwanda, for instance? Or the Armenian genocide? In many instances that was the prototypical 20th century atrocity.
I’ve already referred to Nazi genocide, but since I suspect you’re about to make some silly point about National Socialism, I’ll throw a few other instances into the mix.
You’d have a lot more luck in finding nationalism as a common denominator, regardless of the ostensible ideology of those committing genocide.
I bet Roger Bacon = John Greenfield
mark says:
THe statist project hit the wall in the seventies when the bolshie Old Left and the hippie New Left both started to shakedown the Big End of Town bosses and the suburban bơurgeois at the same time. The combination of industrial socialism and cultural socialism was too much for the ruling elites to bear.
The problem for post-modern statists is that everyone wants to get the government to do their bidding but no one wants to pick up the tab. This problem gets 10X worse when everyone starts to celebrate their multicultural diversity or indulge their sub-cultural perversity which leads to a collapse or splintering of community values.
Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism were both aimed at restoring accountability to the state and constraining the run-away tendencies of state expenditure in an era of lower economic growth. SOmething had to be done to stop the advanced political economies from turning into union feather-beds and welfare roll pads.
A number of ideological lessons have been learned.
Socialism requires more, not less, institutional transparency and accountability. That is why such things as HECS are a good form of socialist institution.
Socialism requires more, not less, communitarian sentiment. The more diverse and mutable the preference function the less possibility for socialism. So jiggery-pokery with politically correct special interests should be mercilessly crushed. Karl Marx would have supported the intervention.
Democratic statism makes some forms of regimentation inevitable, as the coming ecological public goods delivery will show. Bottom line: if you want communal statism then people have to pull their heads in and fit in with the majority.
mark says:
Yes, a whiff of the Gulag will do that to ya. More generally, socialism and capitalism are both institutional forms of modernity. But they have to work with the individual substance of pre-modernity. In short, social structure must fit with our special natures.
Capitalism must not be too libertarian or else our pleasure-seeking instincts will get the better of us. Conversely, socialism must not be too egalitarian or else our status-seeking instincts will find mischief to get up to. Both capitalism and socialism must conform to communalism, our need to have a proper institutional structure that constrains our individual nature.
I will not take your bet Zarquon, at odds of less than 100:1
Where’s the challenge?
Greenfield lacks the intelligence to even disguise himself on a blog FFS!
Mark -
Anti-humanism is a concept in currency. It means what I’ve said it means. I find it preposterous that I have to justify it.
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It says: there’s a limit to the scope of human perfectibility because we are entrapped by forces that are larger than us.
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I was not being Foucauldian. Maybe you think that because you’ve read Foucault and ignored Nietzsche. That’s where he’s getting his ideas from and Nietszche’s gettin’ his from Schopenhauer and so on. But I was discussing Marx.
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But now that you mention The Order of Things - yes it’s pertinent. I assert that Kuhn’s paradigm concept is useful here. the Humanities is now stuck in a cloud produced by Humanist-Anti-Humanist conflict. This has produced certain doctrines of Truth at war with one another.
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On the one hand: supreme confidence in the scientific method. utterly disregarding the inevitable extenuating distortions that human hierarchies have always (necessarilly?) imposed on those subject to them. On the other: the doctrine that Truth is a creation of ‘language’ a word used, like discourse and others, far beyond its connotative designation to signify the apparatus of some underlying , hidden structure that makes objectivity impossible.
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The result? It’s impossible to make the Intellectual Right see that one needs to factor difference into policy. It’s impossible to engage with the Intellectual Left about anything that threatens their own Realm of Discursive Truth without spiralling off into semantic arguments about fairly straightforward terms to the benefit of no-one.
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It is however a strategically advantageous game for the insider. Criticism can always be dismissed by the condescending dismissal of its bearer on the basis that they haven’t done adequate amounts of research into the psychadelic variety in new definitions for old words.
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My Argument: the activities of the political intelligensia are subordinate and periferal to the political game. The political game is a monkey game. Ape politics.
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Subvert the dominant paradigm? Nah! Change the syntagm man. This one’s giving me a headache.
Ay Carumba! Here’s something. Everyone who doesn’t know it already get it tatooed on your forehead: THE FRENCH ARE OVER-RATED - SERIOUSLY!!!!
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You wanna know what Marx said, read him - Marx not Althusser. Read Freud not Lacan. Read Nietzsche not fuckin’ Foucault.
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It’s not like no-one ever had a thought before the 20th century. They were better at thinking than we are. They didn’t have TV.
Adrien, I’m not trying to be too demanding - it just that “we are entrapped by forces that are larger than us” seems to me to encompass just about every variety of social and political thought - maybe other than Nietzsche’s as you say. But even then… It just doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly useful distinction analytically in the way you’re employing it. What would a humanist political theory look like?
# 44 Mark Sep 1st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The Rawandan and Armenian genocides were pogroms caused by unfortunate accidents of geography and ancestry. These things happen.
THe killing fields of Flanders were really the “prototypical 20th century atrocity”.
Nationalism was fundamental in triggering the war. THat was its ideological principle.
But socialism was instrumental in waging the war. That was its logistical practice.
Rathenau used autarchic central planning to run the German war economy during WWI. Both Hitler and Lenin learned their economic practices off Rathenau, not Gobineau or Marx.
National Socialism is merely putting the whole nation onto a war economy footing forever. It was a bastard hybrid of nationalism and socialism brought to perfection by the Nazis during WWII in the extermination of the Jews.
mark says:
No. “Nationalism” is not the “common denominator” in the 20th century’s worst examples of genocide. State socialism, whether fascist or communist, is though.
Nationalism has been pretty much pervasive and perpetual since the onset of modernity. It reflects the natural human preference for community. THe overwhelming majority of nationalist movements and nationalist governments have not been genocidal (c’mon now, the National Party genocidal?)
The Communist party that has been fingered in most of the worlds bloodiest acts of genocide during the 20th century. THey were, even Mark would agree, state socialists alright. With a vengeance.
State socialism of the totalist kind is usually a necessary condition for the really big genocidal crimes, along the lines of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. That is the grain of truth in the Hayek-Friedman thesis.
To do any kind of crime - including crimes against humanity - you need motive, means and opportunity. THe motive for genocide is usually economic class or ethnic clan, both of which were present in National Socialism. The opportunity for genocide is usually some kind of civil disturbance such as war, revolution or depression. State socialism gives a committed cadre the most effective means of oppression (public monopoly ownership of the means of destruction, one might say).
Genocide usually requires both substantial institutional and logistical capacity. So it is state socialism’s capability that is crucial “regardless of the ostensible ideology of those committing genocide”.
State socialism is not, however, a sufficient condition for totalitarian genocide. Evidently the British and Scandinavians have had forms of socialism in the past and managed to avoid tyranny by maintaining a competitive party system.
So representative government - based on a thriving party system - is the most effective bulwark against totalitarian tendencies inherent in state socialism.
On topic:
Having said the French are over-rated let’s have a little Jacques Ellul:
As Ellul has written, the apparatus of the modern media makes available to sections of the political population (those who bother) an outlet of ‘news’ and views that fits in with their opinions. The goal isn’t to confront the reader with criticial information but to reassure that reader that they’re correct, true - right.
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Thus the communist is unaware of Communist iniquity because s/he reads L’Humanite which only lists bourgeois injustices. The conservative is unaware of these because s/he’s reading about the crimes and follies of the commies in Le Figaro. If you want to read harsh criticism of neoliberalism don’t look in The Economist. Likewise you won’t find much by way of the explication of Cuban corruption in Green Left Weekly.
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The purpose is to organize and bolster up a political faith: friends and enemies. That’s why Andrew Bolt is successful. John Pilger oft repeats that political contests in the West are between parties that essentially support identical ideologies. It’s a nowadays common American polemic that ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ bear unprecedented mutual emnity whilst at the same time being politically almost homogenous.
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In The Atlantic Monthly last year Andrew Sullivan argued that the current bitterness is due to the legacy of the Vietnam War. That it’s between those boomers who smoked pot and demonstrated and those who viewed that behaviour as appalling. For Sullivan, the bitter and irrational partisan games that characterize present American political debate is simply the result of an ongoing Boomer shitfight.
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When Sullivan wrote the p