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David Brooks and Bernie Sanders

David Brooks never ceases to annoy. In his Friday column he announces that he cannot vote for Sanders or Trump. He throws into the column his recollections of Soviet Union horrors including 20 million people killed. He argues that Sanders has made excuses for authoritarian regimes like that of Fidel Castro. To be sure, Sanders has noted that Castro did some good things. But Sanders has criticized the authoritarian aspects of that and other regimes.

There is absolutely no evidence that Sanders would undermine civil liberties. None. And to parade the Soviet Union’s atrocities is utterly irresponsible.

Beyond that Brooks maintains that Sanders has been ineffective in the legislature and that he embraces a populism that is hostile to liberalism. He accuses Sanders of lacking reasonableness, compassion, and optimism. He suggests that he exhibits an incessant hatred for his foes.

The column is filled with hyperbole. On the latter point, it seems to me that Sanders has stuck to the issues in the debates and has not exhibited a hatred of his opponents, incessant or otherwise. I do not support Sanders, but Brooks’ column is a disgrace.

I do not mind the claim that both Trump and Sanders support a form of populism. In the case of Sanders, there is no reason to hope or fear that his populist proposals will become law. Even if the Democrats win the House and Senate, and even if the filibuster is eliminated, there are too many not-so-liberal Democrats who will block his proposals.

In the case of Trump, if reelected, however, we will face a politicized Justice Department, a compromised intelligence community, an incompetent and corrupt administration, a politics that threatens the rule of law and respect for just values, a foreign policy that furthers the interests of Putin, an administration that substitutes selfish, wishful, and narcissistic thinking for science and the facts, and an administration that locks children in cages and tries to take health care from millions without compassion. If reelected, we will have a President who on a daily basis exhibits an incessant hatred of his critics and opponents, knows next to nothing about foreign policy, is unwilling to learn from the intelligence community, and engages in spectacularly foolish foreign policy judgments that are guided by his untutored intuitions, intuitions that are often fueled by rage. No one in their right mind appropriately trusts this man with nuclear weapons.

For David Brooks to say that he can’t choose between Sanders and Trump is appalling. In so doing, he joins the Sanders supporters who say they will take their marbles and stay home if Sanders does not get the nomination. Any such invocation of ideological purity is simply inhumane.

Trump's Suit Against the New York Times

Donald Trump has filed a libel lawsuit against the New York Times in which he complains about an opinion piece (published a month before the Mueller Report was released) that accuses Donald Trump of accepting help from Russia in exchange for policies favorable to Russia. As others have rightly observed, on the merits, the suit has no chance of success and appears to be a publicity stunt. https://www.salon.com/2020/02/27/laurence-tribe-trump-campaigns-lawsuit-against-new-york-times-designed-to-chill-the-free-press/

But the attempt for favorable publicity itself will fall apart. If the case is not abruptly dismissed, the Times will be entitled to discovery from Trump and those in his campaign. So, expect the Times to send written questions to Trump (which must be answered truthfully) followed up by a demand for a deposition. Trump will not answer the questions or appear for a deposition. In a civil case, plaintiffs cannot refuse to answer questions relevant to the proceeding. The last thing Donald Trump wants to do is to answer questions under oath about his campaign’s relationship to Russia. The law suit will be dismissed and will be revealed for the abuse of process that it is: one more demonstration of his lack of respect for the law. What has begun as a publicity stunt will finish as an embarrassment.

Is Bernie Sanders Doing a Good Job of Preparing for the General Election (if he gets the nomination)?

What Sanders said about Fidel Castro is accurate, but would any good politician who wanted to win the swing state of Florida double down on this statement? Wouldn’t a good politician emphasize that there was more bad than good in the Castro regime and that he regretted the harm his praise may have occasioned to the many who suffered under the regime?

Sanders opposes fracking for good reasons, but this is not a popular position. Is there any doubt that Trump will call this to the attention of swing state Pennsylvania voters in a powerful way? Can we be confident that current polls will remain steady through the fall after an avalanche of Trump ads?

Would any good politician say that he does not want the $1 billion that Bloomberg had previously promised to spend for any Democratic candidate? See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/bernie-id-rather-lose-than-let-bloomberg-spend-money-on-me.html Bloomberg has now said that he will abide by the wishes of Sanders. Sanders’ throwing away of $1 billion in campaign expenditures on his behalf and against Trump is an astonishing case of excessive ideological purity. It risks throwing tens of millions of vulnerable people under the bus and risks the continuation of our headlong rush toward unchecked power in the hands of a moronic sociopath.

The latest coronavirus outbreak in China: from epidemic to pandemic? (updated links)

In an earlier post based on the work of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, I made an analogical argument from China’s experience with the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) in order to highlight at least two factors relevant to the manner in which the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping has handled the COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) outbreak: “the absence of adversarial politics and open journalism” in contemporary China. At least some of the shortcomings of China’s handling of this latest viral disease can be traced to the authoritarian government’s failure to establish (institutionalize) at least these two components of any healthy democratic polity: freedom of the press and political opposition (the former perhaps more pressingly relevant that the latter). Here I want to broaden the examination of this coronavirus epidemic beyond China. After observations from yours truly, there are links to some articles and posts I’ve found helpful in attempting to understand the many questions and topics broached by this latest viral disease bordering on a pandemic.  

It is rather disconcerting that one cannot find substantive analysis of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that speaks from the vantage points provided by global health law (or international public health law, including international law and infectious diseases), the modern history of epidemics and pandemics, and an integrative biomedical and social determinants epidemiological model that goes beyond exclusive focus on disease (this might help explain various things, including why the disease has spread to certain countries rather than others: at one level, this has an obvious explanation, but I think there’s more to be said here; as well as why it appears, to date at least, it is more virulent in some countries rather than others) [a partial exception to this complaint is found here]. We might also attempt to explain why this new coronavirus broke out where it did and ask to what extent these same social, economic, and health conditions are more or less replicated elsewhere. There are of course other questions to be asked, but it seems there’s a dearth of needed analysis (however provisional or tentative) and comments from the relevant experts in these fields, at least in public fora (are the mass media in part responsible for this state of affairs?). Perhaps it is because they don’t want to be seen as interfering with or even contradicting public statements issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and/or domestic government health agencies like the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC). Be that as it may, it would seem these experts have an indispensable role to play in spreading requisite information and knowledge that can aid both citizens and government officials in deliberative discussions (and as part of planning) that are a prelude to or explain probable or possible executive, administrative, and judicial decision-making of one kind or another tied to this viral outbreak.

More pressing, we have a Presidential administration that, at bottom, does not have genuine respect for and understanding of the various roles and functions of modern Liberal democratic government and administration (hence the routine campaign rhetoric demonizing those who ‘work in Washington’), including the various regulatory agencies and bureaucracies. In effect, this has led to fundamental and alarming failure—a clusterf*ck if you will—to grasp what it means to have the requisite competence and expertise in place within the respective domains of the federal bureaucracy and these agencies. (In fact, this administration has been hollowing out these agencies—including those relevant to the public health crisis—in favor of private, high finance, and corporate power.) This is glaringly and painfully obvious in the manner in which the President and his administration has handled the coronavirus outbreak: the lack of basic knowledge and understanding among official spokesperson (including those testifying to Congress), the inability to deal with unreasonable fears and rumors and properly inform the public of basic facts and statistics (involving as well how to interpret those), the failure to timely or properly coordinate agencies and officials with the national government and, in turn, with state governments and international bodies as well (such as WHO in the first instance) and, closely related to the foregoing, their conspicuous ineptitude when it comes to availing itself of the powers of public speech or democratic rhetoric. Proper appreciation of both democratic deliberative governance and government administrative power as two distinct yet necessarily linked political phenomena is absolutely essential in dealing with a public health crisis of this kind. To date, Trump and his administration has demonstrated utter incompetence in handling public health matters arising from the coronavirus outbreak. Trump’s naming Vice President Mike Pence to lead the country’s response to the coronavirus does not inspire confidence, indeed, I think it’s symptomatic of the regnant incompetence: “Pence once called global warming a ‘myth,’ downplayed the health risks of smoking, and as governor of Indiana, led his state into an HIV crisis by cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and initially opposing needle exchange programs. The vice president also has no medical experience.”

*          *          *

“The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the coronavirus outbreak could cause ‘severe disruption’ to the lives of ordinary Americans, and urged families and communities to start making preparations. The extent of the spread of the virus in the US is uncertain, as the CDC stopped the distribution of coronavirus testing kits after they were found to be flawed. Working testing kits are now available in only a handful of states, and it is not clear when new kits will be ready. Donald Trump told journalists in India on Tuesday that coronavirus is ‘very well under control in our country’ and ‘is going to go away.’ However, the head of immunization at the CDC, Nancy Messonnier, said that disruption to everyday life may be severe as the virus spreads among local communities. ‘As more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder,’ Messonnier said in a telephone press briefing. ‘Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness.’

In the absence of a vaccine or medicines, other methods would be needed to contain the spread of the disease, including possible school closures, and telecommuting where possible instead of travelling to workplaces. ‘I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming, and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now,’ Messonier said. ‘I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning, and I told my children that – while I didn’t think they were at risk – right now, we as a family, need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives.’

The CDC acknowledged that the test kits it began distributing to state authorities earlier this month have been found to be faulty. The agency said in a statement that ‘performance issues were identified related to a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents which led to laboratories not being able to verify the test performance.’”

*    *    *

“[Bruce] Aylward [a World Health Organization expert] said that across China, about 80% of cases are mild, about 14% are severe, and about 6% become critically ill. The case fatality rate — the percentage of known infected people who die — is between 2% and 4% in Hubei province, and 0.7% in other parts of China, he said. The lower rate outside of Hubei is likely due to the draconian social distancing measures China has put in place to try to slow spread of the virus. Other parts of China have not had the huge explosion of cases seen in Hubei, Aylward said.

 A case fatality rate of between 2% to 4% rivals and even exceeds that of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people. A case fatality rate of between 2% to 4% rivals and even exceeds that of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people. Even a case fatality rate of 0.7% — which means 7 out of every 1,000 infected people would die — is sobering. It is seven times the fatality rate for seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.”

• California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says.
• Although longer than even some of my blog posts, this is well worth reading: “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China.” Be sure to check the links to some indispensable articles.
• The Outbreak of COVID-19 Coronavirus: are the International Health Regulations fit for purpose?
• From CNN: Fox News hosts accuse Democrats and journalists of “weaponizing” coronavirus to attack Trump.
• From The New York Times: U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says.
• From the London Review of Books: “The Word from Wuhan.”
• By James Hamblin in The Atlantic: “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus.”
• From HuffPost: “Mick Mulvaney Claims The Media Is Covering Coronavirus Only To ‘Bring Down’ Trump.”

Essential Reading:

• Anand, Sudhir, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen, eds. Public Health, Ethics, and Equity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Fidler, David P. International Law and Public Health: Materials on and Analysis of Global Health Jurisprudence. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2000.
• Fidler, David P. International Law and Infectious Diseases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Fidler, David P. SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
• Gostin, Lawrence O. Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
• Gostin, Lawrence O. Global Health Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Gostin, Lawrence O., ed. Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
• Preston, Richard. Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come. New York: Random House, 2019.
• Quammen, David. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.
• Venkatapuram, Sridhar. Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.
• Wallace, Rob. Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
• Watts, Sheldon. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Image: Feature China/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

William Godwin (1756–1836), 2: The harmful effects of opulence on political and legal institutions

“The opinions of individuals, and of consequence their desires, for desire is nothing but opinion maturing for action, will always be in a great degree regulated by the opinions of the community [J.S. Mill would soon write about the pernicious effects of this ‘regulation’ of individual opinion]. But the manners prevailing in many countries are accurately calculated to impress a conviction that integrity, virtue, understanding and industry are nothing, and that opulence is everything. Does a man whose exterior denotes indigence expect to be well received in society, and especially by those who would be understood to dictate to the rest? Does he find or imagine himself in want of their assistance and favour? He is presently taught that no merit can atone for a mean appearance. The lesson that is read to him is, ‘Go home; enrich yourself by whatever means; obtain those superfluities which are alone regarded as estimable; and you may then be secure of an amicable reception.’ Accordingly poverty in such countries is viewed as the greatest of demerits. It is escaped from with an eagerness that the most indelible disgrace. While one man chooses the path of undistinguishing accumulation, another plunges into expenses which are to impose him upon the world as more opulent than he is. He hastens to the reality of that penury the appearance of which he dreads; and, together with his property, sacrifices the integrity, veracity and character which he might have consoled him in his adversity. [….]

Whatever tends to decrease the injuries attendant upon poverty decreases at the same time the inordinate desire and the enormous accumulation of wealth. Wealth is not pursued for its own sake, and seldom for the sensual gratifications it can purchase, but for the same reasons that ordinarily prompt men to the acquisition of learning, eloquence and skill, for the love of distinction and the fear of contempt. How few would prize the possession of riches if they were condemned to enjoy their equipage, their palaces and their entertainments in solitude, with no eye to wonder at their magnificence, and no sordid observer ready to convert that wonder into an adulation of the owner? If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lacquey [‘archaic spelling’ of lackey] of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an [sic] universal passion [capitalism has proved to be uniquely and extraordinarily adept at exploiting these intra- and inter-personal psychological dynamics and the subsequent ‘universal passion’ sketched by Godwin here]. Let us consider in what respects political institution is rendered subservient to this passion.

First then, legislation is in almost every country grossly the favourer of the rich against the poor. [….] Thus in England the land-tax at this moment produces half a million less than it did a century ago, while the taxes on consumption have experienced an addition of thirteen million per annum during the same period. This is an attempt … to throw the burthen from the rich upon the poor, and as such is an example of the spirit of legislation. Upon the same principle robbery and other offences, which the wealthier part of the community have no temptation to commit, are treated as capital crimes, and attended with the most rigorous, often the most inhuman punishments. The rich are encouraged to associate for the execution of the most partial and oppressive positive laws; monopolies and patents are lavishly dispensed to such as are able to purchase them; while the most vigilant policy is employed to prevent combinations of the poor to fix the price of labour, and they are deprived of the benefit of that prudence and judgement which would select the scene of their industry.

Secondly, the administration of law is not less iniquitous than the spirit in which it is framed. [….] In England the criminal law is administered with greater impartiality [than in France] so far as regards the trial itself; but the number of capital offences, and of consequence the frequency of pardons, open a wide door to favour and abuse. In causes relating to property the practice of law is arrived at such a pitch as to render its nominal impartiality utterly nugatory. The length of our chancery suits, the multiplied appeals from court to court, the enormous fees of counsel, attorneys, secretaries, clerks, the drawing of briefs, bills, replications and rejoinders, and what has sometimes been called the ‘glorious uncertainty’ of the law, render it frequently more advisable to resign a property than to contest it, and more particularly exclude the impoverished claimant from the faintest hope of redress.

Thirdly, the inequality of conditions usually maintained by political institution is calculated greatly to enhance the imagined excellence of wealth. [….] [I]t cannot be pretended that even among ourselves the inequality is not strained so as to give birth to very unfortunate consequences. If, in the enormous degree in which it prevails in some parts of the world, it wholly debilitate and emasculate the human race, we shall feel some reason to believe that, even in the [comparatively] milder state in which we are accustomed to behold it, it is still pregnant with the most mischievous effects.”

William Godwin (1756–1836), 1: On obscene wealth and the evils of poverty

                                                          
While I am not in concord with all of William Godwin’s arguments in his classic book on what is christened “philosophical anarchism,” his ruminations are often quite provocative and worthy of sustained consideration. I happen to believe Marxists or socialists generally, such as yours truly, can benefit from an open-minded consideration of anarchist thought and praxis, that is, an examination not viewed solely through the political polemics and ideological lens of an earlier era. I hope to occasionally share, as below, snippets from his famous work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first published in 1793,* with two later editions).

“A perpetual struggle with the evils of poverty [Godwin is likely speaking of ‘absolute’ poverty, but much of what follows might hold for ‘relative’ poverty as well], if frequently ineffectual, must necessarily render many of the sufferers desperate. A painful feeling of their oppressed situation will itself deprive them of the power of surmounting it. The superiority of the rich, being thus unmercifully exercised, must inevitably expose them to reprisals; and the poor man will be induced to regard the state of society as a state of war, an unjust combination, not for protecting every man in his rights and securing to him the means of existence, but for engrossing all its advantages to a few favoured individuals, and reserving for the portion of the rest want, dependence and misery.

A second source of those destructive passions by which the peace of society is interrupted is to be found in the luxury, the pageantry and magnificence with which enormous wealth is usually accompanied. Human beings are capable of encountering with cheerfulness considerable hardships when those hardships are impartially shared with the rest of the society, and they are not insulted with the spectacle of indolence and ease in others, no way deserving of greater advantages than themselves. But it is a bitter aggravation of their own calamity to have the privileges of others forced on their observation, and, while they are perpetually and vainly endeavoring to secure for themselves and their families the poorest conveniences, to find others reveling in the fruits of their labours. This aggravation is assiduously administered to them under most of the political establishments at present in existence. There is a numerous class of individuals, who, though rich, have neither brilliant talents nor sublime virtues; and, however highly they may prize their education, their affability, their superior polish and the elegance of their manner, have a secret consciousness that they possess nothing by which then can so securely assert their pre-eminence and keep their inferiors at a distance as the splendor of their equipage, the magnificence of the retinue and the sumptuousness of their entertainments. The poor man is struck with this exhibition; he feels his own miseries; he knows how unwearied are his effort to obtain a slender pittance of this prodigal waste; and he mistakes opulence for felicity. He cannot persuade himself that an embroidered garment may frequently cover an aching art.

A third disadvantage that is apt to connect poverty with discontent consists in the insolence and usurpation of the rich. If the poor man would in other respect compose himself in philosophic indifference, and, conscious that he possesses every thing [sic] that is truly honourable to man as fully as his rich neighbour, would look upon the rest as beneath his envy [like the Hellenistic Stoic?], his neighbor will not permit him to do so. He seems as if he could never be satisfied with his possession unless can make the spectacle of them grating to others [for an updated examination of this at once economic and psychological phenomenon, see the last two chapters and conclusion of Nicholas Xenos’ Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 1989)]; and that honest self-esteem, by which the inferior might otherwise attain to tranquility, is rendered the instrument of galling him with oppression and injustice. In many countries justice is avowedly made a subject of solicitation, and the man of the highest rank and most splendid connections almost infallibly carries his cause against the unprotected and friendless. In countries where this shameless practice is not established, justice is frequently a matter of expensive purchase, and the man with the longest purse is proverbially victorious. A consciousness of these facts must be expected to render the rich little cautious of offence in his dealings with the poor, and to inspire him with a temper overbearing, dictatorial and tyrannical. Nor does this indirect oppression satisfy his despotism. The rich are in all such countries directly or indirectly the legislators of the state; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poor of that little commonage of nature which might otherwise still have remained to them.”

• See Pelican Books, 1976 and Penguin Classics, 1985. The Introduction by Isaac Kramnick is quite helpful. See too Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Political Justice (Cornell University Press, 1986) and his entry on Godwin for the SEP.

Please note: I have not forgotten about the second installment on socialism, it is forthcoming anon. Thanks for your patience.

Putin and the Republicans

The Democrats should run against Putin and his accomplices and enablers in the U.S. 

Advice for the Agnostics Among Us

We are not living in the Middle Ages. As Charles Taylor has observed, doubts about the existence of God are common among believers, and many are full time agnostics. As William James understood, agnostics are not off the spiritual hook. They still have to figure out how to lead a good life, and they cannot rule out the possibility of some sort of Divine entity.

Susan Stabile was raised a Catholic, moved to Buddhism and back again. She is always a source of insight. Recently, she drew on Simone Weil to think about spiritual advice for agnostics. Her meditation is short and worth reading. https://susanjoan.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/simone-weils-experience-of-god/ 

Toward recognition and appreciation of laudable incarnations of communism

   

The following snippet is from Nelson Mandela’s speech (three hours long!) in the defendant’s dock at the Rivonia Trial on 20 April 1964:

After reminding those present at the trial that “there has often been close cooperation between the ANC [African National Congress] and the Communist party [SACP],” Mandela points out that “African Communists could, and did, become members of the ANC, and some served on the national, provincial and local committees.” This should surprise no one, after all, “for many decades Communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us, and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society. [….] In the international field, Communist countries have always come to our aid. In the United Nations and other councils of the world the Communist bloc has supported the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism and often seems to be more sympathetic to our plight than some of the Western powers. Although there is a universal condemnation of apartheid, the Communist bloc speaks out against it with a louder voice than most of the white world.”

[As for whether or not Mandela himself was ever a member of the South African Communist Party/SACP (formerly the Communist Party of South Africa/CPSA), I believe he was, at least for a time. On this hotly debated question, see the brief article by Tom Lodge at openDemocracy.]

 

The history of the twentieth-century taught us, there is Communism, and there is communism (or ‘socialism,’ without entering here into the possible distinctions): the former exemplified by the Party-State Communism of the former Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), which became systematically and ruthlessly brutal under Stalin, eventually more or less extending its power over Eastern and parts of Central Europe (e.g., Albania, Poland, Eastern Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria); the People’s Republic of China (where it became known as Maoism); and North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). I’m not interested in rehearsing these countries’ specific failures and accomplishments with respect to meeting basic needs, industrialization, quality of life, human rights, democracy, and so forth, or their putative proximity to or distance from this or that kind of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, what have you (i.e., their fidelity to or deviation from orthodoxy). In addition, there has been quite a few communist guerrilla movements, organizations, political parties (some of them coming into power at the local level or with party representation in ruling governments or coalitions), and individuals, some even with democratic and/or Liberal sensibilities or moments, as it were, especially those that have chosen to participate in democratically elected government or wider national liberation and freedom struggles.

   

In short, let’s just say there are some expressions or incarnations of communism that we might find both politically and morally endurable if not laudable or praiseworthy, forms we can both live and die with in self-respect and dignity (as avowed communists or sympathetic or solidaristic observers). These forms are “humanistic” and humane. You may prefer to view them as exceptions to the rule and I think that is correct, but they are no less notable and hopeful exceptions for all that. Owing in part to the limitations of my own research and knowledge, I want to mention just two such incarnations (thus there are others, including throughout U.S. history) for now: the history of communism in the Indian state of Kerala and the South African struggle against apartheid. I hope at some point in the not too distant future to introduce these provocative examples, beginning with the former case first. For now, I leave you with the titles pictured above and below.

     

As we are in the middle of Black History Month, I’d like to end by noting the many contributions of African Americans and Blacks generally to morally ennobling, courageous, and laudatory forms of socialism and communism as evidenced in the following compilations:

• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• The Black Panther Party
• Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
• Frantz Fanon
• L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
• Malcolm X
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism

Is the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) of any relevance to the COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) epidemic?

 

New and resurgent infectious disease beginning with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, followed by SARS, avian flu, foot and mouth disease, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and others, have brought to the forefront how the increasing interconnectedness of societies also makes them more vulnerable to biological threats to life. For a multitude of man-made reasons, the rate at which new and resurgent infectious diseases affects human populations has been steadily increasing over the past three [now four] decades. Indeed, such vulnerability to biological threats through interconnectedness was thoroughly apparent in the spread of the bubonic plague that started in China before entering Europe in the fourteenth century. [….] If nothing else, the rapid spread across national borders of infectious diseases through human interaction evidences the shared vulnerabilities arising from being human beings, and the necessity to coordinate a response across the human community to mitigate the vulnerability. — Sridhar Venkatapuram, Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach (Polity Press, 2011): 228-29.

First, please read the extract below from an article in the Los Angeles Times. I have a few comments after the piece by way of a possible or provisional answer to our question. That is followed with an op-ed piece also in the Times by Orville Schell, again with comments. Finally, an article in The Guardian provides yet further evidence for the analogical argument I derived (or simply borrowed) from the work of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen.

“Political officials were fired and infection cases skyrocketed in China on Thursday, reminding a nation stuck at home and scientists watching worldwide just how little is known about the coronavirus outbreak that has infected at least 60,000 and killed more than 1,300 people. Previous numbers had been reassuring, with daily confirmations of new infections dropping from several thousand to around 1,000. Officials in Beijing, increasingly worried about the economic toll of the outbreak, urged people to go back to work. State media ran editorials about resuming international flights to China.

But on Thursday the case numbers shot up. Chinese health authorities reported 15,152 new cases of COVID-19 — the World Health Organization’s new name for the viral disease — overnight. Hubei province, the epidemic’s epicenter, accounted for most of the increase: The number of infections went up by 14,840, more than nine times the 1,638 new cases reported there a day earlier.

Then came the purge. Beijing announced that both the Communist Party chiefs of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province were fired and replaced with officials known for ‘stability maintenance’ and closely allied with party chairman and President Xi Jinping. The sackings followed earlier dismissals including the Hubei health commission’s party chief and its director. The under-reporting of the breadth of the epidemic, believed to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, has been blamed on officials who suppressed information on the outbreak to save face among their superiors.”

 

*          *          *

There have been numerous reports of unreliable information coming from China about the number of people possibly infected by COVID-19 (heretofore and commonly known as the ‘coronavirus’) as well as the precise number killed by the virus. The article evidences concerns on the part of the national government about the manner in which regional and local Communist Party officials in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province have handled this viral outbreak (this hardly means those officials bear complete responsibility for any mistakes in this regard). It helps to keep in mind that China remains an authoritarian country and a one-Party “Communist” State (in many respects, it is capitalist and only nominally socialist, let alone communist). Still, it is not the China of the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)* or the Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966-1976). The “Great Chinese Famine” took place during the former period (1958-1961), resulting in estimated deaths ranging from 16.5 million to 29.5 million (with a few later estimates considerably higher than this). As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen wrote in Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989), “While the failure the Great Leap Forward came to be widely recognized after the initial euphoria, the existence of the famine oddly escaped open scrutiny and even public recognition, until very recently [that is, until the 1980s, with several important works on this particular famine published after 2000].” I don’t want to focus on the probable causes of the famine, although it is “clear that there was an enormous collapse of agricultural output and income.” As Drèze and Sen explain, the famine was linked with “policy failures—first in the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, then in the delay of rectifying the harm done, and along with that in accentuating distributional inequalities through enhanced procurement and uneven sharing.”

I want instead to highlight what Drèze and Sen have to say by way of the comparative historical experience of post-independence India in dealing with famines (incipient and actual). First, they point out that “China did not lack a delivery and redistribution mechanism to deal with food shortages as the famine threatened in 1958 and later. Despite the size of the decline of food output and the loss of entitlement of large sections of the population, China could have done a much better job of protecting the vulnerable by sharing the shortage in a bearable way.” But here is the most salient difference with the famine experiences of post-independence India:

“What was lacking when the famine threatened China was a political system of adversarial journalism and opposition. The Chinese famine raged on for three years without it being even admitted in public that such a thing was occurring, and without there being an adequate policy response to the threat. Not only was the world ignorant of the terrible state of affairs in China, even the population itself did not know about the extent of the national calamity and the extensive nature of the problems being faced in different parts of the country.

Indeed, the lack of adversarial journalism and politics hit even the government, reinforcing ignorance of local conditions because of politically motivated exaggeration of the crop sized during the Great Leap Forward and the fear of local leaders about communicating their own problems. The pretense that everything was going all right in Chinese agriculture and rural economy to a great extent fooled the national leaders themselves. [….] Aside from the government’s informational inadequacy, which made its own assessment of the situation disastrously wrong, the absence of an adversarial system of politics and journalism also that that there was little pressure of the government from any opposition group and from informed public opinion to take adequate anti-famine measures rapidly.” In short, what occurred in China happened in spite of post-revolutionary China’s “outstanding record of entitlement promotion and enhancement of living conditions.” Thus Drèze and Sen conclude that “the precise feature of absence of adversarial politics and open journalism … contributed to the occurrence, magnitude, and duration of the Chinese famines of 1958-61….”

Again, the China of today is in many important respects different from the China of the period during the Great Famine (e.g., information circulates faster and far wider than in the earlier period). And of course famines and deadly viruses are two rather different socio-economic and public health phenomena. But I want to suggest one analogy remains pertinent based on the above discussion: “the absence of adversarial politics and open journalism” in contemporary China. I suspect at least some of the possible shortcomings (if that is in fact what we have here) of China’s handling of this latest viral disease can be attributed to both of these characteristic features of a healthy democratic polity: freedom of the press and political opposition (the former perhaps more pressingly relevant that the latter).

* “The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1962. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people’s communes. Mao decreed increased effort to multiply grain yields and industry should be brought to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao’s exaggerated claims. They collected ‘surpluses’ that in fact did not exist, leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials blamed bad weather for the decline in food output and took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths. A lower-end estimate is 18 million and upper estimates find that some 45 million people died. About the same number of births were lost or postponed, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest in human history.”

 

*          *          *

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “Xi Jinping rules China by intimidation and police coercion,” Orville Schell discusses the authoritarian regime’s handling of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, invoking the relevance of the “so-called ‘mandate of heaven’” [tian ming 天命]:

“In this Confucian scheme of things, heaven was said to choose rulers of good moral standing, whose virtuous statecraft and proper ritual observations kept heaven and earth in balance and society in a state of peaceful harmony. The cosmic favor bestowed on these chosen leaders by heaven was evident for all to see in such things as a stable social order and a contented populace. However, if a ruler violated these Confucian proscriptions, throwing heaven and earth out of balance, heaven might signal its displeasure with earthquakes, floods, meteors, droughts, famines and epidemics.”

This concept (and its derivative incarnate conceptions) is not an easy one to understand: see, for example, the essays in Christopher Lupke, The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture (University of Hawai̒i Press, 2005). And when paired with tian (see the ‘study guide’ for Confucianism for a short entry on tian), the possible meanings can vary (whatever the extent of ‘family resemblance’) by textual and contextual source, philosopher, philosophical “school,” ideology, colloquial use, and so forth. I mention this largely because I don’t think Schell gets things quite right here, especially with regard as to how Confucius himself understood tian ming, although we can agree this idea plays a pervasive part in Chinese culture and discourse, the terms “ming” and “tianming” dating back, as Lupke reminds us, to pre-Qing China. Leaving that quibble aside, Schell spells out the possible role the idea of a “heavenly mandate” is playing (and may yet play) in the outbreak and epidemic spread in China of the most recent coronavirus, 2019-nCoV:

“The idea of mysterious forces in heaven determining who rules China is antithetical, of course, to much of what the Communist Party has sought to instill in the Chinese people over the 70 years it has been in power. Still, Confucian thinking and forms of deeply rooted superstition continue to hold widespread sway across the country, including in leadership circles where a Confucian revival is in fashion.

Disease outbreaks are especially tricky within the mandate of heaven construct. Epidemics are, of course, a normal part of life everywhere in the world. But in the case of a disease perceived as spreading because a ruler (and the officials who serve him) failed to sound an early warning for self-serving reasons, it is not difficult for ordinary people to conclude that their leaders have angered heaven by abandoning virtuous rule. It’s not yet clear whether the Chinese people will start to see President Xi Jinping through this lens in the current outbreak, but as the virus spreads from the central Chinese city of Wuhan out around China and the world, he is certainly being besieged by criticism, especially on social media.

Xi’s neo-Maoist toolbox is stocked largely with Leninist instruments of control. But viral outbreaks operate according to their own rules, in their own autonomous universes, and the 2019-nCoV epidemic is beyond the influence of the usual party methods: political censure, intimidation by surveillance, police coercion or even imprisonment. The 2019-nCoV outbreak is confronting the autocratic Xi with a foe as imperious, unyielding, unrepentant and uncontrollable as his own regime. Despite an unprecedented government response to the epidemic and the virtual lockdown of millions of Chinese citizens, this invisible adversary continues to proliferate. In so doing, it has stripped Xi of his aura of invincibility in ways that no political dissident, opposition party or revolutionary movement ever could. And his tardiness in sounding the alarm against it, and then his inability to contain it, at least to date, has led to a growing public outcry and an upwelling of skepticism about his form of techno-authoritarianism.

Whatever happens next, Xi’s latter-day mandate of heaven has been called into question, just as the Nationalist rule was called into question during the late 1940s. Back then, Mao Tse-tung was helped to power when Chiang Kai-shek was perceived as having lost his mandate after becoming mired in corruption, self-interest, tyranny and famine. Then, in 1976, the Tangshan earthquake and the death of Premier Zhou Enlai were viewed by many as heralding the end of Mao’s own revolutionary dynasty. And now with social media savaging the Party’s handling of the present crisis, another wave of error and blame has taken hold in China to challenge the once seemingly invincible Xi.”

And now the concluding paragraph, which I severed from the above because it resonates with what I wrote in response to the question, “Is the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) of any relevance to the COVID-19 epidemic?”

“The current upwelling of negative sentiment must be taken seriously, even though it is not year clear what it will signify. Xi has managed to gain unilateral command of the Party and state structures by rigidly controlling the flow of information. However, in the present crisis the absence of free-flowing information has helped allow this epidemic to spread and become such a menace. And Xi’s failure to contain it will affect how his people view both him and his latter-day heavenly mandate to rule, long after the threat of this spreading disease has been brought under control and the economy begins to recover.” [emphasis added]

I repeat, the China of today is in many important respects different from the China of the the Great Famine (e.g., owing in part to social media, ‘information’ circulates faster and far wider than in the earlier period). And, again, famines and deadly viruses are two rather different socio-economic and public health phenomena. Yet one analogy remains distressingly pertinent: “the absence of adversarial politics and open journalism” in contemporary China.

• This discussion thread at the Chinese and comparative philosophy blog, Warp, Weft, and Way, is helpful for thinking about tian ming in the work of Confucius and Chinese philosophy and history generally

*          *          *

Alas, this article from The Guardian reiterates and provides further confirmation of the analogical argument (after Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen):

“Even now, when the virus has made 70,000 people sick and taken more than 1,700 lives, the government is still trying to hide information. Thousands of posts were deleted from the online group asking for help, including Lin’s. I was told by editors of Chinese media outlets that I couldn’t write about anything that reflected negatively on the government. It is not new for figures in government to put their political interests ahead of public health. But given the rapid spread of the virus and the gravity of the situation in China, I thought the government could put aside the censorship and propaganda for a while. I was wrong.” [emphasis added]

Progressives and Deplorable Conduct

Some of Bernie Sanders’ supporters (it’s hard to know how many) are acting in ways that give the campaign a bad name. In response to Clinton’s criticism of Sanders, a recent thread on Facebook in various comments accused her of being moronic, narcissistic  (or possessed by power hungry narcissism), idiotic and venal as hell, a piece of s..t, completely insane, a thug, corrupt, motivated by envy, or motivated by money. To this I responded, “If Sanders wins, you will have to secure the votes of former Clinton voters. If Sanders does not win, you will assist in the re-election of Trump by not voting for Warren or a "moderate" candidate. Do you really think the ferocity of the above comments is constructive? Is it possible that Clinton's comments are sincere (however misconceived) and not prompted by mental illness, a thirst for power, money, or the like. I don't like her statements either, but in my opinion, there is a Trumpian quality to the comments assembled in this thread.”

A few days ago a group called NY Communities for Change bragged that they brought a coffin to a Biden fund raiser “to mourn the death of Biden’s campaign. They wouldn’t let us in, but we held a service in the lobby.”

In response, Bob Shrum, long time advisor and speech writer to major Democratic candidates, said “this is Trumpism on the left. And I’m a progressive Democrat. It’s obscene and debases you as you assault a man who has lost a wife and two children in the most painful ways. I denounce you; Sanders should too.”

Shrum has not endorsed a candidate in this campaign and neither has NY Communities for Change (From their site it is clear that they will not be supporting Mayor Mike or Mayor Pete). But there is something deeply wrong and pragmatically foolish when progressives act like Trump.

“Aside from questions of ethics and morality, torture is illegal. It’s also ineffective.”

“Growing up in a Jack Bauer-ized world, many of my generation have an indelible belief that torture works. There’s a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, so Kiefer Sutherland has to put a knife through the kneecap of the bad guy, threaten their family, and after some intense moments, the terrorist will give up the location of the bomb. Of course, in the real world, it doesn’t work like that. Aside from questions of ethics and morality, torture is illegal. It’s also ineffective. This was the bipartisan conclusion in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report of 2014, based in part on studies done by the CIA itself, which previously eschewed torture in favor of more reliable methods of interrogation.

Apart from being ineffective, torture is often counterproductive. Many of the detainees subjected to it simply lied to get it to stop. For instance, a detainee named Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo detainee who was subjected to lengthy torture, gave false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were subsequently used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country.

However, the legal issues we deal with as defense lawyers go far beyond torture. Take the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi accused of masterminding the attack on the U.S. guided missile destroyer Cole in 2000. In addition to torture, his case so far has involved: 1) the government having secret listening devices in defense attorneys’ spaces; 2) the trial being forced to go forward despite having an unqualified defense attorney; 3) the judge trying to get a job with the Justice Department while overseeing the case, resulting in a federal appeals court throwing out more than three years of rulings; and 4) confidential communications between the judge and defense attorneys being inadvertently turned over to the prosecution. And that’s just from one detainee’s case.

Others have waited nearly two decades without their day in court.”

Please see Aaron Shepard’s op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times (Feb. 13, 2020), “John Adams would have defended the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.” (Aaron Shepard is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps.)

See too: Torture: Moral, Legal & Political Dimensions — A Basic Bibliography

The lamentable state of the Fourth Estate in increasingly brittle and would-be democratic polities

 
“Can Journalism Be Saved?”

Nicholas Lemann for The New York Review of Books (February 27, 2020) 

 
Lemann more or less discusses fourteen books in this review essay! It is quite good, indeed, indispensable for a timely, critical overview of contemporary journalism.

“What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. The political implications of this are painfully obvious, in the United States and elsewhere: in journalism, the poorer, the more nativist, the angrier parts of the country (which vote accordingly) are the ones where journalism can’t deliver on its public promise because of its severe economic constraints. Journalism is a case in which it’s going to take a whole new set of arrangements, and a new way of thinking, to solve the present crisis.”

 
The full article is here.

 
(It seems there are a few more titles I will need to add to the mass media bibliography!)

 

Please note: should it be hard to read the book covers above just put your browser over any of them and click to see a larger image.

What is socialism? (part 1)

While the possible motivations behind this meme (our picture above) are likely sincere and well-intended, the meme itself is misleading because inaccurate and confused. As Chris Maisano explained in short contribution to The ABC’s of Socialism (Verso and the Jacobin Foundation, 2016) when similar memes circulated the last time Sanders ran for President, we find listed policies, programs, and institutions as “ostensibly socialist programs whose only commonality is that Uncle Sam carries them all out:”

“Some directly serve social needs and involve some measure of income redistribution (public libraries, welfare, the WIC program [Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children], Social Security, food stamps). Some seem thrown in for no good reason…. Others are basic operational activities that any modern government, regardless of its ideological orientation, would carry out (the census, fire departments, garbage and snow removal, sewers,¹ street lighting). And still others involve the vast apparatus of coercion and force (police departments, the FBI, the CIA, the military, courts, prisons and jails).”

Several of the items listed in this meme do serve to remind us that a number of significant institutionalized programs and entitlements we now take for granted were once advocated by socialists (and social democrats), both here and abroad. In the words of John Nichols, “Socialist ideas, now so frequently dismissed not just by the Tories of the present age but by political and media elites that diminish and deny our history, have shaped and strengthened America across the past two centuries. Those ideas were entertained and at times embraced by presidents who governed a century before Barack Obama was born.”²  Maisano continues:

“In a country as deeply and reflexively anti-statist as the United States [of course there are contradictions here, as the military-industrial complex and the criminal justice system attest], the identification of socialism with government is perhaps the worst possible rhetorical strategy the Left could adopt. ‘Like the DMV? Then you’ll love socialism!’ isn’t a slogan that will win many converts. More importantly, conflating all government action with socialism forces us to defend many of the most objectionable forms of state activity, including those that we would want to abolish in a free and just society.”

More harmful and insidious in both intention and effect is the recent “red-baiting” by putative liberals who should know better. The most appalling instance of this comes courtesy of recent comments by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, as reported here by Peter Wade for Rolling Stone, (February 8, 2020):

“MSNBC’s Chris Matthews’ fear of socialism sparked an unbelievable post-debate rant about a possible Bernie Sanders presidency where he suggested the candidate might have cheered socialist-led executions in Central Park during the Cold War. Matthews began by praising Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Friday debate performance but then veered off by warning viewers and a live studio audience about his personal views on socialism. The host suggested that Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders might have supported the violence of past socialist leaders. Matthews said he’d keep his opinions on socialism to himself, but quickly reversed himself.

‘I have my own views of the word “socialist” and I’d be glad to share them with you in private. They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,’ he said. Matthews continued, ‘I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?’ Then Matthews made the connection to Sanders, claiming ignorance about whether or not the candidate did, in fact, support violence and public executions.

‘So, I have a problem with people who take the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years,’ Matthews said. ‘I don’t know what he means by socialist.’ When MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interrupted saying that Sanders is ‘pretty clearly’ in favor of the type of socialism found in countries like Denmark, which Matthews had said was harmless, Matthews again suggested Sanders might have supported violent regimes, asking, ‘Is he? How do you know? Did he tell you that?’” [….]

This is the kind of ranting and raving rhetorical bullshit we’ve come to expect from Republicans, their devotees, and the President, but to hear it from a longtime liberal is quite disconcerting, to put it mildly. While Sanders has avowed identification with democratic socialism, his actual political views and policy proposals—as well as his record as a politician—are more accurately characterized, as Chris Hayes insinuated above, as social democratic, which is too often mistaken for or confused with democratic socialism in contemporary American politics (social democracy of course had its origins among democratic socialists on European soil).

And to make matters worse, or at least adding insult to injury, we now have another MSNBC veteran, Joe Scarborough, nodding his head in agreement when former Democratic strategist James Carville screams about the “leftward lurching” of the Democratic Party (having conveniently forgotten how far to the Right the party has moved across the political spectrum over several decades), a lurch that’s made him “scared to death” of the November 2020 election. Carville doesn’t like Sanders’ policy proposals and is frightened by what he tendentiously describes as his “ideological purity.” Carville is shrewd enough, however, to state he’ll vote for Sanders if he’s the party’s nominee: “Look, Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat. He’s never been a Democrat. He’s an ideologue. And I’ve been clear about this: If Bernie is the nominee, I’ll vote for him. No question. I’ll take an ideological fanatic over a career criminal any day. But he’s not a Democrat.” There is a robustly conservative and calcified wing of the Democratic Party (its contribution to neoliberalism) that has dominated the national political scene for some time now, and today it is compulsively chanting “Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump” and “He’s not electable” in the hope that it will act as a self-fulfilling prophecy or culminate in successful wishful thinking.

It is painfully clear that neither the principal hosts of MSNBC or CNN, nor their typical talking head guest pundits, have any knowledge whatsoever of liberal democratic socialism.

*    *    *

In a future post, I will recommend a short list of books I believe essential to thinking carefully, thoughtfully, and critically about what socialism has been, should be and yes, can be. For now, I will provide an all-too-brief synopsis that, for me at any rate, gets to the heart and soul of what socialism means. Minimally speaking, it takes us beyond “capitalist democracy,” that is, beyond the Welfare State in its three principal forms: liberal (including its most tenuous form: ‘neoliberal’), corporatist, and social democratic. Under socialism, the commodity logic, vagaries and ‘predatory nature’ (G.A. Cohen) of markets will no longer rule (directly and indirectly) our lives.

Socialism endeavors to instantiate the sundry benefits (with corresponding burdens) of representative, participatory, and deliberative democracy throughout all sectors of society (in the first instance, the commanding heights of economic production, corporations, banking, and other institutions of political economy). It is especially important with regard to principles of planning (at all levels of government or governance) and investment decisions, neither of which should be the institutional or structural prerogative of any de facto or de jure economic or political elite. The principles of egalitarianism and notions of community (as the late G.A. Cohen argued, one fundamental requirement of which is that ‘people care about, and, when necessary and possible, care for, one another, and too, care that they care about one another’) are paramount, the former an attempt to correct for disabilities, disadvantages (class and otherwise, including all those for which the person cannot be held reasonably responsible, be they natural or social) and (eliminable) vulnerabilities, while simultaneously enhancing a person’s capabilities and possibilities for individuation and self-realization (or what some term‘ self-actualization,’ the latter depending in the first instance on the former) as indicative of progress in individual freedom and moral autonomy.³

Socialist modes of organization depend on clarity with regard to principles of socialism. And before we spell out such principles, we should state forthrightly that socialism involves presuppositions and assumptions about human nature (e.g., that are, as we say, open-ended and ‘perfectibilist’ in the sense intended by both Godwin and Condorcet, in other words, this does not entail the achievement of ‘perfection’) and psychology as expressed in a number of different worldviews throughout history and around the globe. This does not imply anything heroic or especially virtuous on the part of everyone in a would-be socialist society, given that things are organized so as to take advantage of the better parts of our nature.

By way of conclusion, I quote from Jerry Cohen: “Any attempt to realize the socialist ideal runs up against entrenched capitalist power and individual human selfishness. Politically serious people must take those obstacles seriously. But they are not reasons to disparage the ideal itself. [....] The socialist aspiration is to extend community and justice to the whole of our economic life [where the ‘economic’ is understood in the sense of Marxian political economy, thus a much richer conception than that which dominates conventional economics].”

Notes

1. Yes, it is true that there was once something christened “sewer socialism” in this country, as socialist mayors in Milwaukee fought for sewers, among other things for the poor and working class. “Local political opponents dubbed these mayors ‘sewer socialists,’ a term that was soon embraced by them and their supporters. ‘Some Eastern smarties called ours a “Sewer Socialism,” wrote Emil Seidel, the first of the mayors, in office from 1910 to 1912. ‘Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers.’ He and his successors, Daniel W. Hoan (1916–40) and Frank Zeidler (1948–60), sought to clean the city—both literally and metaphorically—tackling corruption while improving public works system and public health. [….] Seidel, who won the 1910 mayor’s race by a landslide, perhaps spelled out the platform most clearly in his memoir: ‘We wanted our workers to have pure air, we wanted them to have sunshine, we wanted planned homes, we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And, we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music dance song and joy for all.’” From Linda Poon’s article for CityLab, “Who Were Milwaukee’s ‘Sewer Socialist’ Mayors?” (March 13, 2019):

2. John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of and American Tradition … Socialism (Verso, 2011): xii.

3. It perhaps cannot go without saying, but it appears that many socialists, at least those with an intellectual disposition or philosophical bent, and others more intuitively or inchoately, believe that socialism can contribute to human happiness or eudaimonia (see the passage from former Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel in the first note above), that it is capable of providing a necessary (thus not necessarily sufficient) condition for self-fulfillment and meaningful moral autonomy. Indeed, I would argue that socialism is a species of what David L. Norton defines as “eudaimonism,” which in turn, is a variety of moral individualism, and “unlike some forms of individualism it does not conceive of individuals as ‘atomic,’ that is, as inherently asocial entities [I happen to think such forms are fairly rare, at least in political philosophy, so this may be a straw man, although solipsistic ‘bootstrap-pulling’ and ‘self-made man’ ideological myths obdurately persist in conservative and libertarian circles]. [….] [E]udaimonism recognizes persons as inherently social beings from the beginning of their lives to the end but contends that the appropriate form of association undergoes transformation. As dependent beings, persons in the beginning of their lives are social products, receiving not merely material necessities but their very identity from the adult community. The principle of association is the essential uniformity of associates, usually expressed in terms of basic needs. Subsequent moral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to realization of values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly, the meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. … [It thus] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. [In such cases,] [t]o follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy to heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [M]oral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to the realization of values. The self-fulfilling life of each person requires more values than he or she personally realizes and is dependent upon other for these values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly this meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. [This] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. To follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy into heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse in subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some forms of romantic individualism that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.” Socialism expands both the range and type of opportunities individuals acting alone and in concert (as members of civic groups and communities) have for fulfilling their responsibility to realize or actualize objective value(s) in the world.” Please see David L. Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991).

The Upside of a Post-Impeachment World

One downside of the impeachment and Senate non-trial of Donald Trump is that it distracted media attention from the important bills passed by the House which are still sitting in the McConnell graveyard. Just because the media has focused on impeachment does not mean that the Democratic House has neglected important policy needs. In fact, the House has passed more than 400 bills.

I mention this as a prelude to a brief response to Daniel Henninger’s “Wonderland” column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in which he claims that normal political issues will not be relevant to the Democratic Party’s strategy in 2020. Instead, he hypothesizes, the Democrats will run against the person of Donald Trump and forego consideration of the normal political issues. All this to conceal the divisions in the Democratic Party.

Mr. Henninger’s column is aptly named except it is he who lives in wonderland.  Of course, Democrats will run against Trump – the ignorant, lazy, corrupt monster. But the principal issue is 2020 will be the same it was in 2018. The Republicans want to take away the health insurance of millions, and they are in court trying to do precisely that. In 2018, the Democrats pushed kitchen table issues in their states and districts, and they have passed bills to speak to those issues including minimum wage, the environment, equal pay for women, election security, gun control, pre-existing conditions, prescription drugs, and the like. The reason those bills are not law is a do-nothing Senate led by a corrupt Speaker who won’t even let the bills get to the floor.

Of course, the Democrats are divided on issues of policy, but not so divided that they cannot hammer out agreements on policy in the House. And, we can be sure, that Democrats across the land will be forcing Republicans to justify their unwillingness to pass legislation the people want and need.

All of this is obscured by the fantasies of Wonderland. It will also be obscured by the media’s single-minded focus on the Presidential race. But when the campaign begins and Democrats all over the country are running, the dreams of Wonderland will be shattered and perhaps the mass media will broaden its horizons.

President Trump is well-versed in “projection” as a dark art of illiberal and anti-democratic rhetoric

I thought to share the following material because President Trump so routinely exemplifies “projection” in a pathological sense (given his megalomaniacal narcissism). The most recent instance of this occurred yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he indulged in his penchant for rambling, disjointed, and angry diatribes (another ‘stream-of-consciousness monologue’), apologizing to his family “for having to go through a phony, rotten deal by some evil and sick people,” namely, Democratic members of Congress and all those who assisted them in his impeachment. As the article in today’s Los Angeles Times notes, Trump “veered from sarcasm to scorn,” “toggl[ing] between brash triumphalism and maudlin self-pity, at times vindictive and vulgar, blithely attacking Democrats and basking in ovations from scores of Republican lawmakers, aides and political allies who crowded into the East Room of the White House.”

Here are a couple of definitions of “projection” from dictionaries for psychoanalysis:

Projection (it has a slightly different meaning in Kleinian thought with the notion of ‘projective identification’)—“A mental process whereby a personally unacceptable impulse or idea is attributed to the external world. As a result of this defensive process, one’s own interests and desires are perceived as if they belong to others, or one’s own mental experience may be mistaken for consensual reality. The ideas or feelings that a person cannot tolerate may unconsciously undergo a transformation before they are projected, as is often the case in paranoid projection.”  [….] Projection is arguably “ubiquitous in both normative and pathological states. The difference lies in the degree to which one believes in the validity of the projection as one’s idea or another’s, that is, in one’s capacity for reality testing.”

Projection—“A mental operation by which feelings and desires that a subject rejects or refuses to recognise are treated as if they emanate from within another individual. It is a defensive operation in that the subject is able to disavow unacceptable affects and wishes. Projection figures prominently in, for example, racist attitudes, where disavowed ideas are attached to some hated group; in paranoia, where self-criticism is experienced as reproach from others, and in phobias, where some internal danger is felt to be emanating from an external source, which can then be avoided to produce a greater sense of safety.”

For more extensive treatments of and elaboration upon this fundamental Freudian concept, please see:

• Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.) The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988/first published in 1973 by Hogarth Press).
• Moore, Burness E. and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995). See the word in the index, as it is not the subject of any one chapter topic.
• Spillius, Elizabeth Bott, et al. The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Routledge, 2011/based on R.D. Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 2^nd, 1991).

The Iowa Results and Societal Sickness

The fact that Iowa is demographically unrepresentative is a serious problem, and Iowa should not be the first in line for the selection of Presidential delegates. That its results are later than they should be, however, is considered a serious problem only by those who are desperate for instant gratification. Regrettably, their numbers are many. That is a form of societal sickness. Thus, Stanford Law Professor Nathaniel Persily refers to the misguided apoplexy of those cable pundits who could not announce the results immediately.  The notion that the delay warrants any significant conclusions about the Democratic Party is  preposterous.

L x A=W: On The Weight of Legal Norms

L x A=W: On The Weight of Legal Norms

Peter Gabel

The critical legal studies movement and the emerging law and political economy movement both emphasize the way that legal rules and doctrines help both to constitute and to legitimize an unjust social and political order. Critical Legal Studies, which I have been closest to over 40 years, started out with many tendencies—Marxist and neo-Marxist, legal realist with a more leftist political bite, anti-formalist with both progressive policy-oriented and deconstruction-based wings, and also with a critique of social alienation that emphasized the distortions in human relations that are masked by law’s empire, law’s historical attempt to justify as morally elevated what has been lived in reality, to some significant degree, as suffering and injustice and estrangement.  But for all of the diversity in its beginning, CLS has gradually come to be understood in the public mind as primarily a deconstruction of the seeming fixed character of legal doctrine.  In the work of many actual CLS writers, and certainly in the work of many who write about CLS and its meaning as a school of left legal thought, CLS has primarily come to be associated with the idea that legal doctrines are always indeterminate in their application, and that therefore the actual application of law always requires moral and political judgment.  And once thus unmasked of its pretense to neutrality and objectivity apart from choice and decision, law must be understood as an inherently politically-informed activity, with the corollary that there can be no separate arena for a professional class to legitimately engage in a specialized form of thought (or mere “craft”) called legal reasoning that is distinct from underlying moral and political commitments, however conscious or unconscious those commitments are.

As important as this last contribution by CLS has been to opening up critical thought about law, it has in my view had a shortcoming…a tendency to overestimate the plasticity of law by separating the cognitive dimension of legal thought from the world of social being out of which legal ideas are born. In Marxism, that world of social being is defined by the economy and the supposed material interests that drive it, with law serving to reflect/encode/legitimize those interests…and thus the legal norms of freedom of contract, for example, both reflect and legitimize the operation of the free market, the exploitation of labor, and at the level of the superstructure, the culture of competitive individualism. To this formulation, CLS adds that the legal norms don’t merely reflect but also help to constitute those socio-economic practices through a juridico-moral discourse given a falsely determinative character, with collective obedience to law (and deference to the existing system) being the result, in part, of the appearance of determinacy (if legal norms don’t dictate results, there is nothing to “obey”).

But the shortcoming here, of both the Marxist account and the CLS critical modification or transformation of that account, is (in my view) that the “world of social being” is neither shaped exclusively by material interests, nor by legal discourse or any other linguistic or representational feature, but by the flow of intersubjectivity that manifests both the everpresent desire for mutual recognition pulsing through every human being from birth, and the fear of the other’s disconfirmation of self that is awakened by this desire. That fear of disconfirmation, or if you like non-recognition or misrecognition (though I prefer disconfirmation), is an historical artifact, the result of centuries of social alienation of self from other enacted through war and violence, through the reproduction of class societies, through patriarchy and racism, and most generally through the fear-saturated reproduction of social separation that has disabled us from becoming fully vulnerable to one another, from fully entering into each other’s presence as I and Thou, to use Martin Buber’s formulation.

This is to say that social alienation has a “weight” that shapes social relations decisively, though not completely because of the desire for authentic mutual recognition that always, in every moment, transcends it. As I show in my recent book The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self, this weight of social alienation is lived out and carried forward through rotating patternings in social life in which each person internalizes the degree of alienation transmitted to him/her/them through every encounter and then re-externalizes it toward others in a circulating fashion, forming the lived terrain of “society” at any given time.

The weight of social alienation thus generated and reproduced (internalized and re-externalized) is measured at any given moment by the balance between fear of the other and the desire to transcend that fear present in the social field as an intersubjective flow of social energy, of life itself. To the extent that a given historical moment is characterized primarily by the circulation of fear of the other, to that extent the social world appears “heavy”—it weighs down upon us in its inertia as each of us feels compelled, against our own transcendent longing, to re-externalize the withdrawnness of spirit transmitted to us in a rotating fashion. And the reason for this is that ontologically we must become the way we are recognized…we are each social in our very being and we shape each other through how we experience and are experienced by each other, through the balance of fear and desire in our inter-experience. 

To the extent that the weight of social alienation is “heavy” upon and within us, to that extent the norms of social life are not “indeterminate” but are rather weighted down beyond our social ability at that moment to lift them. This isn’t to say we can’t try, in every interaction and across social space in groups and organizations and nascent “movements”; but if the weight transmitted through social space is very heavy, it probably cannot for the moment be moved, although the heavy world can be everywhere influenced and inflected by our efforts. And the importance of that work of inflection, as well as the potential for it in every social interaction and flow, should not be minimized—it remains the visible source of hope as we try to find the key to reversing the circulation of alienation so that desire everywhere contained can break out, can break on through to the other side, can become a public force for good.

Because legal norms are expressive of the field of social being out of which they emerge, they carry the weight of that social field—in fact as mere verbal concepts and accompanying signifying practices, they both “reflect” the social field in which they are enmeshed and they help to constitute that field by rotating the field itself through their legitimating prism. (The Supreme Court “pontificates” the necessity of the “world” it expresses with the rightness of that world’s “is-ness”, and adds some weight to it that way). For Critical Legal Studies, legal norms are indeterminate in their application to any case because CLS apprehends those norms abstracted from the field, but within the field in its social reality as a living interexperience in history, these legal norms carry the weight of the degree of social alienation shaping their transmission. Or we could say, using a kind of sculpture metaphor, that a legal norm prevailing at any time is made of the material of that moment’s social flow and that material always has a certain weight measured by the degree of social alienation present in it.

If we were to try to express this point through a kind of Newtonian formula, we could say that  W=L x A, where W equals the weight of a legal norm, and L equals the legal norm itself (or doctrine or rule), and A equals the degree of alienation prevailing at a given moment. The degree of determinacy of any legal norm, then, would depend not only upon its abstract plasticity, but also on the weight it carries within itself as a manifestation of the degree social alienation present in the social field at any given time.

Consider the legal norm prohibiting gay relationships prevailing not so long ago, perhaps 50 years ago. That legal prohibition was weighed down by the then culture’s level of social alienation that normatively channeled legitimate sexuality into heterosexual life and so to speak “clung” to that single exclusive form of intimate vulnerability as part of the denial of desire for a truly open society. In this sense, at that moment, sex between same-sex partners appeared to threaten the fear-saturated heterosexual world with loss of the “clinging” or defensive possession of one’s opposite-sex partner. As I show in “The Fear of Gay Marriage” (please see my book Another Way of Seeing p. 131), it is the generalized fear of the other, of the presence of real other persons, experienced as a terror of vulnerability, that leads to the hyper-possession of only one kind of sexual partner (heteronormativity) and the demonization of other forms of sexual expression and love. And in this environment, the law was not in fact plastic or indeterminate in relation to the possible application of, say, “the right of privacy” to strike down anti-sodomy laws, much less to use of a constitutional “fundamental right to marry” or use of 14^th amendment equal protection doctrine to allow gay relationships to be reconciled with the then sanctity of heterosexual marriage. The purely cognitive notion of indeterminacy would suggest that it would “always” have been possible to strike down homophobic laws by use of available constitutional doctrines, but when the cognitive is more fully embedded in the reality of intersubjective life as it is actually lived in history, we can see that the weight of the homophobic legal norms 50 years ago made them precisely “heavy” with determinacy. How our actual culture interprets the indeterminate legal materials is not merely a matter of political choice in the cognitive sense, but of the degree of alienation across the culture as a whole determining the distribution of the weight of the legal materials. When legal norms are “weighted down” by a circulating fear of the other that blocks and forbids open-heartedness, these norms become closed to liberating interpretations.

The LGBTQ movement, as one vector of the bursting-open force of the 60s, is an ideal vehicle for allowing us to see the relationship between the “rising” of a social movement and the gradual lightening of a legal norm, which then makes possible the reinterpretation of suddenly plastic legal materials. For the effect of this movement, like that of all social movements that are liberatory and embody the realization of previously blocked human desire, has been to partially thaw the frozen character of historical heteronormativity. The wider social movement out of which the LGBTQ movement was able to gain its traction in social space was itself a movement of the desire for authentic mutual recognition and vital, erotic human connection breaking beyond its alienated constraints. That force of desire and longing for human connection, for escape from and transcendence of the withdrawn space enclosed by fear of the other, of each other, is what actually moves in a movement…it is what the word “movement” actually refers to in its evocation of lived social being. In its LGBTQ manifestation, that movement expressed itself in a sustained, insistent challenge, across this entire 50-year period, to the closure of sexual space that required the demonization and often brutalization and murder of gays and lesbians. And to the extent that the force of the movement introduced into social space a living alternative to fear of the other, of the person next to us, to that extent the collective heart became open enough to be less frightened of vulnerability, less defensively possessive of a single legitimate sexual channel, and therefore more open to the moral truth of the LGBTQ desire for participation in the erotic sphere of human community. Out of that gradual thawing at the level of social being in historical context could emerge Lawrence v. Texas striking down anti-sodomy laws, and then later Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing gay marriage, at the level of the transformation of legal doctrine.

It is the liberating and binding power of social movements, as they “emerge” and “rise up” in social being, that allows law and legal doctrine to gain the real historical plasticity that CLS and perhaps LPE want to claim for it. The work of showing this plasticity of legal materials in every field of law is still very valuable and worth doing as intellectual work that widens in our perceptual field the visible social space that we could walk through if we were to become able to do so. But the reality of the transformative power that this critical legal work aspires to also requires an alliance with the great disalienating force of desire and longing that pulses through every human heart, and that holds the power, when ignited and organized into a mutually affirming movement, to dissolve the false appearances to which the world as a hold clings in periods of the hegemony of fear. 

If we understand this disalienating force of desire as a radiant energy that can, when liberated, spread very rapidly from person to person through the interbeing medium that connects us, and if we understand alienation as a the counterforce of fear of the other that blocks the flow of desire and pools it up within now-separated “individuals,” we may now expand upon our Newtonian metaphor to say that the degree of alienation is a function of the fear-desire ratio prevailing at a given historical moment, or better, within or “during” a given historical time-flow. This in turn permits us to expand upon the formula L x A=W, with the degree of alienation now understood as a function of the fear/desire ratio, which can be expressed as A=F/D. If A is greater than 1, law is increasingly determinative in its application. To the extent that A approaches and becomes less than 1, law becomes increasingly plastic and open to liberating interpretation.

Of course these formulas should be taken lightly, but they do name something real—the collective longing and effort to overcome the historical constraints that separate us and the ricocheting power of opening our hearts to each other’s presence once we can get the ball rolling.