What follows are excerpts from two books I've recently finished. The first I pulled from my own bookshelf long ago purchased at a used book sale, but never read. It was referenced in something I read earlier this year. The book was written in 1969 and I was reading it simultaneously while I was reading another book written the same year. I blogged about them bother earlier
here, but I was only part way through this one. While each excerpt can stand pretty much on its own, the result of the whole picture is more important to this feeble mind. thought that connects these two disparate
The unity of thought that connects these two disparate books is what I found remarkable as I read them simultaneously. The excerpts might not show that as clearly as reading either or both tomes would. Each is worth a read and maybe these excerpts will whet an appetite or two to try them. They have much to say about our own time and possible paths forward. The spirit of both of these writers is embedded in a commitment to democracy with a small 'd'. There isn't even a smattering of arrogance in their writing but of the possibilities for a better world if we would only reflect on what we truly value as a human family on a finite planet.
Excerpts from Michael Harrington’s Toward a Democratic Left: A
Radical Program for a New Majority (1969)
The military-industrial complex bases itself on a permanent
war economy and a huge military establishment. This enormous vested interest in
annihilation, Eisenhower feared, could subvert the democratic process in
matters of war and peace. (p. 77)
In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower had been
particularly alarmed by the possibility that the military-industrial complex
would come to control education. He was concerned about ‘the prospect of
domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment’ and the possibility
that ‘public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific,
technological elite.’ In part Eisenhower’s fears have been justified. As Clark
Kerr testified – perhaps too candidly from the point of view of his own career –
in The Uses of the University, Federal grants and big business needs
are playing an increasing role in determining the shape and quality of higher
education in America. But now with the social-industrial complex, the danger
becomes more pervasive, for it extends to the kindergarten and the Job Corps
camp as well as to the graduate seminar. There are those … who would make the
knowledge industry the servant of the educators. But there seem to be many more
who follow the jubilant philosophy expressed in the Wall Street Journal articles: that schools shall now be designed to
fit machines rather than the other way around. (pp. 88-9)
Washington has a role to play at every part of this process
[research and development]. Since it would be political suicide to admit that
the state is thus accommodating itself to the goals of the corporations, the
exact opposite is proclaimed. This is done by defining the society’s purpose so
as to make it identical with that of the big firms. It is therefore a national
article of faith that any increase in the Gross National Product is good even
when it takes the form of carcinogenic cigarettes or noisome automobiles. This
creed provides ample justification for Federal support of just about anything
the private sector desires, but it does so in the name of the nation rather
than of business. (p. 104)
The abolition of poverty and racism, the reconstruction of
urban life, and all the rest simply do not make economic sense within the
corporate calculus. And therefore these very fine and educated people will
unwittingly perpetuate the very chaos which offends their sensibilities. (p. 110)
As I noted earlier, the [Automation] Commission replied to
the president that, if all productivity gains from 1965 to 1985 were taken in
the form of leisure, the nation could choose between a twenty-two-hour week, a
twenty-seven-week year, or retirement at thirty-eight years of age. (p. 113)
[Here Harrington offers a possible approach]
The President shall be obliged to make to the nation a
periodic Report on the Future. The
report shall project the basic choices and different futures before the country
and estimate both the economic and social costs of alternative programs. It
shall specify which groups stand to make particular gains from the various
courses of action. The report shall state a Social Consumption Criterion which
will clearly measure the impact of every department of public expenditure on
the social standard of living. In particular, it shall explain exactly how the
major areas of spending are contributing toward the abolition of poverty and
racial discrimination.
The report shall be presented to a Joint Congressional
Committee on the Future, which shall hold public hearings on it. Staff funds
will be provided to any significant group of legislators, whether they are on
the committee or not, so that they can write a substitute report or propose
major amendments to the President’s draft. The House and Senate will then
debate, and vote on, the general economic and social orientation of the
American government during the next period. (I am deliberately vague about
the time span. Whether it should be gear to a four year Presidential political
cycle or to a period determined by economic considerations hardly need to be
settled now. The important point is that the report’s horizon be set in the middle
distance where historic options begin to take shape. (pp. 114-5)
Examples abound in Washington of academic debates over
statistics which are the façade of group conflict. The AFL-CIO definitions of
unemployment usually yield higher percentages than the department of Labor,
which in turn, takes a grimmer view of joblessness than does the National
Association of Manufacturers. The scholars involved in this fight are not
dishonest, but they do have special angles of vision. (As I wrote in The Other America, in 1959 Fortune magazine and I used the same
income figures and they were happy about how many Americans were rich and I was
outraged about the number who were poor.) (p. 116)
Above all the democratic Left must incarnate a vision of the
future. America’s unplanned planning has been rigorously guided by commercial
priorities. Unless there is a conscious movement in a new direction, this
society will continue publicly to fund its catastrophes, though in the next
period it will do so more in the name of social industrialism than in that of
Adam Smith. (p. 130)
The United States could be building a full-fledged
meritocracy in which intellectual ability and competitive drive determine a
person’s social and economic position. If that is the case, then there is a
grim future in store for the winners and the losers. Those who achieve will do
so by turning their brains into a salable commodity. Those who fall behind – and they will be
disproportionately recruited from the black and white poor, though no fault of
their own – will have greater feelings of resentment and inferiority than those
at the bottom of past societies. Their Humiliating plight will be theoretically
a consequence of their innate deficiencies and not of the structure of the economy.
In fact, as Chapter 3 showed, their educational and cultural deficiencies will
have been cruelly imposed on them by the white and well-off. But the hurt will
be done so discreetly that even the victims will think it is their fault.
The most immediate tactic for countering these tendencies is
to raise the intelligence of the entire society. What is called intelligence
is, in any case, to a considerable degree, a social product. At the most
brutal level, starvation during a child’s early years will physically affect
his brain and maim him for life, a savaging of the human spirit which was
documented in Mississippi as recently as
1967 and which certainly persists to this moment. Providing a decent diet for
everyone in the society would among other things, put an end to this tragedy.
More subtly, increasing levels of health and the standard of living and
widening the range of experience have already made the IQs of middle-class
schools higher than those of the slums. Thus, one consequence of programs for
full employment and decent housing will be to make people, and particularly
those who are now systematically denied the decencies of life, smarter. (p. 145)
India provides and even better example of the profitable
uses of American generosity. This particular case grows out of the fact that
there is money to be made in the starvation market. Forbes magazine – which advertises itself as a ‘capitalist tool’ –
headlined the cover story on the March 1, 1966 issue ‘Feeding the World’s
Hungry Millions: How it Will Mean Billions for U.S. Business.’ The American oil
companies, Forbes said in its
article, had got the message and were embarking on fertilizer production. Then
there came this frank and revealing anecdote: ‘For a long time, India insisted
that it handle all the distribution of fertilizer product in that country by
U.S. companies and that it also set the price. Standard of Indiana
understandably refused to accept these conditions. AID put food shipments to
India on a month-to-month basis until the Indian government let Standard of
India market its fertilizer at its own price.’ And so it was that, in the 1967
AID proposals, the request for $50 million for fertilizer for India was a ‘tied’
grant and the stated goal of encouraging private enterprise – which is to say
American oil corporations – in this area. (pp. 170-1)
It is not just, as has been seen, that these grants are
often an indirect and subtle subsidy to American businessmen. More than that,
the hungry of the globe have been paying larger and larger tribute each year in
order to be helped. The UN Economic Survey of the world during 1965 put the matter
quite succinctly. In that year the self-help efforts of the Third World resulted
in an increase in saving (that is to say, of the surplus they were able to
deduct from their meager and sometimes starving, consumption) of 6 percent. But
at the same time there was an outflow to the advanced countries in interest and
profit that went up by 10 percent. As a result, the UN concluded, the
developing countries were sending back more than half the funds they receive!
(p. 172-3)
The oil industry, then, acts according
to the classic Leninist scenario. It profiteers in the Third World, supports
local reaction, opposes democratic and modernizing movements and sometimes is
able to treat the United States as if it were a hired plant security guard. At
almost every point the result has been to make American foreign policy more
reactionary. If the country’s international actions were dedicated toward the
creation of a world in which the gap between the rich and poor nations would be
reduced, the oil industry would suffer. The resultant misery of various
millionaires would be real, but it would not overturn the American economy. The
catch is, of course, political. Oil is tremendously powerful in Washington, and
therefore any hope of a truly democratic foreign policy would require the death
of its domestic influence. (p. 195)
In his farewell message President
Eisenhower had said of the ‘immense military establishment,’ which was ‘new in
the American experience,’ that its ‘total influence – economic, political even
spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of Federal
Government.’ If America were to embark on a genuinely democratic foreign policy
and seek to create a new world in which
the gap between the rich and poor nations would be abolished, this vested
interest in death would be threatened. For an emphasis on international construction,
massive investments in men and money in the Third World, and disarmament would
reverse the priorities which have prevailed in the postwar period. (p. 201)
A vast increase in war spending, on
the other hand, is almost always accompanied by an end to social innovation.
The emotion of patriotism unites the entire nation, and class differences are
submerged in the common effort. In the case of a shooting conflict, the
military obligingly dispenses with competitive principles and adopts uneconomic
methods like cost-plus contracts (when it is necessary in a conservative cause,
or in fighting a war, America is always ready to turn its back on the myths of
the market economy, bust such idealism is almost never applied to truly
idealistic projects). (p. 201)
For these, and many other reasons
the American Congress will enthusiastically vote $50, $60, or even $70 billion
for defense while it haggles over a less than $2 billion appropriation for
fighting poverty. And it is dangerous to think that, as peace begins to break
out, it would be simple enough to transfer funds from the work of destruction to
that of construction, The socialization of death is, thus far at least, much
more generally popular than the socialization of life. A shift of money from
Defense to, say Health Education and Welfare would demand a basic turn toward
the democratic Left within society. (p. 201-2)
To begin with, the basic
infrastructural needs of the poor nations – roads, education, cheap mass
housing, etc. – are simply not profitable investments. Indeed, no one is really
interested in building decent homes for the poverty stricken within the United States, and smart
money would shun such an undertaking overseas even more so. As T.C. Blair has
written, ‘…the criterion of profitability when applied to Africa too often
leads to high monetary receipts but low real social benefits. Investors channel
money into profitable export produce and minerals and avoid investment in ‘unprofitable’
homebuilding, school construction and low cost food protein production.
Profitable external economies are created with a consequent stagnation of the
domestic economy. Investment in the production of goods with high utility for
low-income African consumers continually lags behind other investment sectors.’
This analysis fit Latin America perfectly. (p. 225)
So there is no easy road out of
underdevelopment, and one must talk pragmatically about some sort of
international mixed economy. Yet there is a crucial point which can be rather
simply put: the Third World cannot put its faith in Adam Smith or any of his
heirs, for the market mechanism is a cause of, rather than a solution to, its
poverty. Understanding this fact will require that the United States get over
some of its favorite prejudices. (p. 228)
For however it is done in a
technical sense, the substance of every one of these ideas is the same: that
the richest lands in history voluntarily surrender some of the advantages which
they built into the very structure of
the world economy and that money must be transferred from rich to poor rather
than, as now, the other way around. This does not mean that the wealthy nations
are supposed to opt for poverty in order to fulfill a moral obligation to the
less fortunate of the globe. It simply means that these affluent countries will
enrich themselves at a somewhat slower rate and without pushing the majority of
the world’s population more deeply into misery. This can be done. There are sober
and intelligent proposals which have already demonstrated the possibility of
creating a new world by changing the present injustice of aid and trade. So the
crucial question is not technical but political. (p. 239-40)
But there was, and is, another form
of anti-communism. It sought some alternative to communism and the status quo,
for it recognized the right and necessity of revolution but struggled that it
might be democratic, not totalitarian. The views of Galbraith and Robert
Kennedy, discussed at length earlier, are obviously in this tradition. Indeed,
this attitude regularly provided the official rhetoric for American involvement
in the Cold War itself. ‘The seeds of totalitarian regimes’ Harry Truman said
in 1947, ‘are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil
soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a
people for a better life ahead has died.’ (p.243)
The United States and the Soviet
Union, having brought mankind to the brink of nuclear holocaust, could simply
walk away from the Cold War, retreat into their separate self-interests and
respect each other’s injustices. Or the United States could take the lead in a
gigantic international effort for the reconstruction of the world. There are
economic arguments for such a course and they should be stated. But ultimately
if this is to be done it will happen because the deep-running force of American
idealism bursts the channels in which the generals and executives have confined
it and takes its own direction. That is the politics of hope. (p. 245)
When there was hope, people joined
together for militant action which proclaimed their dignity. This was the way
of the original revolutionists, of the Abolitionists, the populists, the
trade-unionists, the civil-right activists and all the others who constitute
the living tradition of the American Left. But when fear predominates, as
today, this very same independence of spirit drives a man to defend his own
equality by attacking his neighbor’s. (p.278)
There is no consensus possible with
such men as long as they hold to their institutional values. The Left must
therefore attack their power democratically and nonviolently and thereby widen
the areas in which people organizing themselves politically are stronger than
money. For when a free society avoids conflict, that is not an act of civic
prudence but a surrender to the manipulative elites which work behind the façade
of unanimity. (p.283)
From Terry Gibbs, Why
the Dalai Lama is a Socialist.
[Gibbs shows in this tome how the fundamental values of socialism and Buddhism are aligned using his deep experience in both traditions. ]
Resolving those contradictions,
according to Marx, requires a solid understanding of how economic systems (or ‘modes
of production’ in Marxist lingo) have functioned throughout history and how the
related institutional structures give rise to particular social relations. Marx’s
work in many ways laid the ground for the concept of structural violence,
although the term wasn’t coined until the late 1960’s by peace activist and
academic Johan Galtung. The approach Marx developed to understand the mechanics
of particular economic systems demonstrates how economic structures throughout
history have embodied particular forms of violence and suffering and how those
structures have benefited some social groups or classes and disadvantaged
others.
Gary Leech argues that ‘structural
violence manifests itself in many ways, but its common theme is the deprivation
of peoples’ basic needs as a result of existing social structures. Those basic
needs include food, healthcare and other resources essential for achieving a
healthy existence and fullest human development possible. Such inequality is
rooted in the oppression of one group by another.’ Galtung notes that without a specific
individual ‘perpetrator’, structural violence can be much more insidious than
direct physical violence. ‘There may not be any person who directly harms
another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and
shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances. Resources
are unevenly distributed. … Above all the power over the distribution of
resources is unevenly distributed.’ (p. 62)
But it is not only the indigenous
peoples’ way of knowing that have systematically marginalized in our education
systems in capitalist societies. And it is not only Canada’s indigenous peoples
who are being channeled into business and professional studies – these are
issues for youth throughout the world. Responsible parents do not encourage
their children to study philosophy, especially responsible parents from the
global South. Obviously students have to figure out how to earn a living in our
world, but the areas where this is possible under capitalism have become narrower
and narrower and an individual’s value is largely determined by their capacity
to generate income and profit in the market. Naturally then, many parents want
their children to become business people, doctors or lawyers as opposed to
philosophers, artists or musicians. As a society, we are making these kinds of
choices about what is important, about values we want to cultivate, and about
what kind of world we want to live in.
As a socialist lens makes clear, in
many ways, and for many years now, our approach to higher education suggests we
cannot afford to have an education system that does not feed practically into
the capitalist economy. The belief that a university should be a place in our
society in which we have space to nurture the well-rounded human being has
almost become a quaint notion. In our current era of corporate globalization,
being able to respond to respond to the demands of the ‘market’ is the key job
of administrators, and marketing the university’s ‘brand’ is the most important
role of the development office. Educators increasingly need to prove themselves
as ‘sustainable’ within this context and students need to strategically choose
the appropriate professions. This state of affairs does not mean that everyone
has made this shift willingly or that nothing good happens at universities
anymore. I am speaking here about a general trend. The education system is an
important space in which societies should be able to engage in critical
discussions about their priorities and directions. (p. 78-9)
All of this consumerism might not
be so problematic if we were actually fulfilled by it and were not harming
ourselves, others and the planet. As I noted previously, the problem is not
that we consumer per se, but rather that those of us with sufficient wealth are
engaged in rampant consumerism which, as Marxists remind us, requires a
production system, that by necessity, cannot be bothered with questions related
to the environment or the rights of living beings. It is not that powerholders
in the capitalist system enjoy causing suffering to others and nature, it’s
just the logic of capital accumulation requires those consequences of their profit-making
remain secondary considerations. Therefore, a ‘right view’ requires a questioning
of the logic of the growth model and a serious critique of consumerism. (p.
100-1)
