A false premise?

"[The article] puts forward some new arguments to explain 'grassroots resistance' to the deep marketization in many societies and answers the question why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else."

Written by a Russian economist. In what respect has "deep marketization" failed in Russia?

I'd say this was a hoax meant to make fun of evolutionary psychology, but that doesn't seem to be the case

This: http://news.yahoo.com/why-im-a-creationist-141907217.html

Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God. The evolutionary psychologists with their just-so stories for everything (“You use a portable Kindle charger because mothers in the primordial forest gathered ginseng”) have become more contradictory than Leviticus. Did you all see that ev-psych now says it’s women who are naturally not monogamous, in spite of the same folks telling us for decades that women are desperate to secure resources for their kids so they frantically sustain wedlock with a rich silverback who will keep them in cashmere?
Sigh. When a social science, made up entirely of observations and hypotheses, tells us first that men are polygamous and women homebodies, and then that men are monogamous and women gallivanters—and, what’s more builds far-fetched protocols of dating and courtship and marriage and divorce around these notions—maybe it’s time to retire the whole approach.
All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”

I mean, what better argument against half-assed evolutionary explanations of social behavior than to say that it encourages belief in creationism!

Also, a little earlier in the piece, there's this perhaps unintentionally cutting observation: "I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom." I mean, the unembarrassed juxtaposition of technology-commodity worship and old-fashioned religious obscurantism!

The case for it being at least kind of a joke would be based on 1) the purely trolling mention of climate change and 2) the fact that it really is hard to believe someone honestly following the reasoning that, more or less, science is confusing so let's default to the old testament.

This is a lie.

"This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed."

"a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system"

American Sociology: History and Racially Gendered Classed Knowledge Reproduction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power-relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying “Othered' ” knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the “institutional-structure” of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of “intersectionality.” In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's “historical materialism” and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of “intersectionality.”


Journals should probably issue rules to the effect that "there should be no more than 1 numbered list of 3 or more items in any abstract." I'm also inclined to think that not much anything good comes from theorizing history.

DEEPLY muddled

This is rare, but I can't even begin to make head or tails of this abstract.

Sagi Cohen, "'The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel': Debating between History and Theory" Journal of Historical Sociology.

When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.

NB also this note of acknowledgment: "This version of the text is deeply indebted to both its anonymous reviewers, to whom I would express my necessarily asymmetrical gratitude, for what I can only describe as a pure gift."

Very important issues

The Discreet Charm of Lenin

from Journal of Historical Sociology by Petra Rethmann

Abstract

This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political desires, the article offers one analytical interpretation of the continuing preservation of Russia's revolutionary and also Stalinist past. By arguing that the Lenin mummy simultaneously functions as camp and kitsch, and as an embodied time of eternity, I also seek to understand how “grandiose” understandings of Soviet history work in this present.

Sometimes our culture still manages to surprise me for its absurdity

So, this: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2013-04-24/finance/38773627_1_billionaires-u-s-senators-graduate-school

My first reaction was to just be appalled that someone with a job at a major research university was doing something this idiotic:

Billionaires are among the world’s cleverest people, according to new research. In “Investigating America’s Elite,” Jonathan Wai, 33, a research scientist in psychology and member of Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, looked at the correlation between wealth and brains — or at least, brains as measured by education. Some 45% of billionaires rank among the smartest 1% of people in the U.S., the study found. Other groups with high representation in the smartest set: U.S. Senators (41%), federal judges (40%), and Fortune 500 CEOs (39%).

Wai looked at five groups of America’s business and political elite, totaling 2,254 subjects. The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, senators and members of the House of Representatives had attended either a selective undergraduate institution or graduate school, Wai’s research found. And if they attended one of the 29 “elite colleges,” they were considered to be among the top 1%. Wai chose the schools based on their average SAT scores and American College Test scores, as tracked by the “U.S. News & World Report.” Average SAT scores of 1400 or greater — a combined score on the math and critical reading sections — put a school in the top 1%, he says.

No seriously, he comes to the conclusion that "America’s elite are largely drawn from the intellectually gifted, with many in the top 1% of ability" (from the abstract) based entirely on the fact that graduates of top colleges and grad programs tend to end up in powerful positions. The problems with that are so extensive I can't even think about it.

But that's not the part that makes this a classic. This article brings in someone to criticize the study - one Steve Siebold. "A former professional tennis player who coaches Fortune 500 executives on mental toughness, Seibold has been interviewing multi-millionaires and billionaires since college, and he says many of the world’s wealthiest people have little or no formal education." Now, he does make a few of the relevant points (about e.g. that college admissions and the SAT are not perfect proxies for "intelligence" to put it mildly). But that's not the bone he primarily wants to pick. Well, let me quote: 

Siebold: This is based on a faulty premise. If I have a lot of money, I can get into one of the country’s elite schools. Family connections are a big part of attending colleges too. George W. Bush got into Yale. I’d love to see him get into Yale without the Bush name. I say that after 29 years interviewing the 1,200 wealthiest people in the world. I was broke and I wanted to be rich. I just wanted to follow the wealthy so I could be one of them. I found that anyone can be rich if they can find a problem and solve it.
Siebold: In terms of what separates the wealthy from the average person, it starts with their beliefs about money. Guys like Trump and other rich people tend to have positive beliefs about money. The average person tends to believe that rich people are narcissists. America wouldn’t exist without rich people.
Siebold: ...I’m more interested in how successful people use their use their emotions to work long hours that no rational human being would work and take chances that no ordinary person would take.

In other words, we get this bogus research pushing one version of the American meritocratic ideology, and they bring in to oppose it some guy pushing the contradictory ideological alternative that "you can make it if you try!"

"Here, cows' bodies, movements and subjectivities are trained and manipulated in accordance with a persistent discourse of agricultural productivism"

Cows' subjectivities? Really?

Re-capturing bovine life: Robot–cow relationships, freedom and control in dairy farming

from ScienceDirect Publication: Journal of Rural Studies

Available online 26 February 2013
Publication year: 2013
Source:Journal of Rural Studies

Robotic milking machines are novel technologies that take over the labour of dairy farming and reduce the need for human–animal interactions. Replacing ‘conventional’ twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, it is claimed that robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. Such claims are certainly contested, but the installation of robotic milkers clearly establishes new forms of relationships between cows, technologies and dairy farmers. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with farmers and observational research on farms to examine relationships between representations of robotic milkers as a technology which gives cows freedom and autonomy, and practices and mechanisms which suggest that bovine life is re-captured and disciplined in important ways through the introduction of this technology. We focus on two issues. First, we explore changes in what it is to ‘be bovine’ in relation to milking robots, drawing on a combination of a discursive framing of cows' behaviour and ‘nature’ by dairy farmers and on-farm observation of cow-technology interaction. Second, we examine how such changes in bovinity might be articulated through conceptions of biopower which focus on knowledge of and intervention in the life of both the individual cow body and the herd. Such knowledge and intervention in the newly created sites of the robotic milking dairy are integral to these remodelled, disciplinary farm systems. Here, cows' bodies, movements and subjectivities are trained and manipulated in accordance with a persistent discourse of agricultural productivism. In discussing these issues, the paper seeks to show how particular representations of cows, the production of embodied bovine behaviours, technological interventions and micro-geographies contribute to a re-capturing and re-enclosure of bovine life which counters the liberatory discourses which are used to promote robotic milking.

Highlights

► The paper examines notions of bovine autonomy in robotic milking systems. ► Concepts of biopower in human–animal–technology relationships are developed. ► Manufacturers' claims and on-farm experiences of robotic milking are compared. ► The paper examines how bovine life is ‘recaptured’ in robotic milking systems.

Watkins and Miller

Things that didn't make it into the memo.

First, in something that Miller later identifies as the "alteration principle," he insists that in principle, any social fact could be changed by the "relevant" individuals, given the will and sufficient information about the situation. Miller seems unhappy this, though I'm not 100% clear on why. His idea seems to be something like a false consciousness argument: that it is possible for individuals to be systematically confused about what they want, and so prevented from acting to change collective practices that damage their interests. In contrast, I actually like this idea a lot as a way to express the essential mutability of social relations. Of course, one needs to be more explicit than (the ideologically tinged) Watkins of what's involved here: the "relevant individuals" are at the least going to have serious collective action problems (think the difference between individualistic and organized strategies by workers) and very likely going to have systematic conflicts of interest (e.g. the "relevant individuals" in anything involving work conditions are going to include employers).

Second, Watkins says this: "The practical or technological or therapeutic importance of social science largely consists in explaining, and thereby perhaps rendering politically manageable, the unintended and unfortunate consequences of the behavior of interacting individuals” (112-3). This strikes me as a remarkably clear statement of the ideal of "reformist liberal" social science. For one thing, it's pitched in terms of "unintended and unfortunate consequences" as opposed to objective conflicts. But even more interesting is the implicit equation of the "practical" consequences of social science with first technology, then therapy, then political manageability. Talk about a grab-bag of ideological metaphors. Politics is not about conflicting claims, but about "management" of problems that are implied to be akin either to "magneto trouble" (to use Keynes' phrase) or individual maladjustment to society.

Weak beer

Question: “Are Schools the Great Equalizer?" ASR 2004

Answer: Yes. “Although the gap does not close in school, it does not widen as fast as it otherwise might.”

Riiiight.

It's the 19th century all over again

Two Views of Social Justice: A Catholic/Georgist Dialogue

from American Journal of Economics and Sociology by KENNETH R. LORD

Abstract

Sixteen scholars have come together in this issue to examine eight social-justice themes from the perspectives of Catholic Social Thought and the philosophy of Henry George. The themes they address are natural law, human nature, the nature of work, the nineteenth-century papal encyclical Rerum novarum, causes of war, immigration, development, and wealth, and neighborhood revitalization. While they sometimes wrangle with each other, their common aspiration is the same as their nineteenth-century predecessors: to find solutions to the human suffering caused by injustice.

WTF academic navel-gazing

This is so wrong.

Social Forces at 90

Arne L. Kalleberg

This volume of Social Forces marks the 90th anniversary since it was founded in 1922 by sociologist Howard W. Odum. He served as editor until 1954; a full list of editors is provided in the front matter of this and every issue of Social Forces. The first article to appear in the journal was by Franklin H. Giddings, on the topic of “The Measurement of Social Forces.”
During the years since its founding, Social Forces has been recognized as a top journal of social research nationally and internationally. It has always sought to highlight the best in sociological inquiry while at the same time exploring the realms shared with social psychology, anthropology, political science, history and economics.

Reflecting on the Past

To celebrate this milestone anniversary, we highlight some of the articles published in the journal during the past five decades that have been especially significant statements on important topics. When deciding which articles to emphasize, I was guided by two main considerations: first, I’ve selected articles that have been especially influential as measured by citation counts and other usage statistics. Second, the articles chosen cover a range of topics that have been well represented in Social Forces through the years.
I asked the authors of these articles to write a short piece in which they reflect on questions such as: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first wrote the article? How have your views on the topic changed since you wrote the article? How has the article influenced subsequent research on this topic? And, what is your (brief) assessment of the current state of research on this topic? I am grateful to the authors of these articles, all of whom responded enthusiastically to my invitation to write their reflections.
The articles represent a varied mix of the types of high-quality social science research and theorizing that has been published in Social Forces over the years: theoretical statements on subjects such as social movement organizations, delinquency and trust; discussions of measurement issues involved in studying topics such as tie strength in social networks, residential segregation and religion; and empirical analyses of economic stratification, family structure and child well-being and the gender division of household labor. All of these articles [End Page 1] have held up remarkably well over time and still have much to say about the topics that they address.
Reflections on these articles are printed in this issue of Social Forces. In addition, Oxford University Press is producing a virtual online issue that will include the reflections along with links to the original articles. This virtual issue will be made freely available to everyone.

The Varieties of Capitalism

At present, every advanced industrialization economy in the world is capitalist--production and employment are primarily carried out through the private investment decisions of profit-seeking firms and individuals. Yet, the institutional organizations of these economies vary immensely, with significantly divergent consequences for macro-economic outcomes. Broadly, these institutional variations encompass employer-labor relations and the provision of benefits outside the labor market through the welfare state. From the perspective of the analysis of capitalist class interests, restrictions on their relationship with employees and institutions that cushion current or potential employees from the competitive rigor of the labor market should seem to be anathema to capitalists, and yet institutions that do precisely that have survived, despite strains, for several decades in Europe.

Does this mean there are in fact situations in which employers' have a positive interest in institutions that improve the bargaining position for workers if they also increase productivity?

Einstein on the Beach

Robert Wilson, original director of the opera

I went to the revival at BAM some years ago, and I was there for the opening, and then I went back a week later, and walked down the aisle. There was an empty seat, and I sat down, in the empty seat on the aisle, and Arthur Miller was sitting next to me. And after about 20 minutes he turned to me, and he didn't know who I was, and he said, "What do you think about this?" I said, "I don't know, what do you think? And he said, "You know, I don't get it." I said, "You know, I don't get it either."

I am shocked. Shocked.

“You Fold Like a Little Girl:” (Hetero)Gender Framing and Competitive Strategies of Men and Women in No Limit Texas Hold Em Poker Games

from Qualitative Sociology

Abstract  

The formal rules, structure and practice of most sports in contemporary society prohibit men and women from competing on a “level playing field” and diminish women’s ability to launch a legitimate challenge to the masculine superiority embedded in sports competition. This study examines a relatively unique case—No Limit Texas Hold Em poker games in which men and women compete directly against one another under the same rules—to explore how the conditions under which men and women compete enable or impede the development of more gender egalitarian interactions and ideological frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic data, this examination reveals that, even in a more gender-neutral context, men and women learn to use heterogender frames to conceptualize poker. In doing so, they develop competitive strategies and interactions that predominately fit into, rather than subvert, gender hierarchy.

• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-20
• DOI 10.1007/s11133-012-9235-3
• Authors
  • Michelle Wolkomir, Centenary College, Shreveport, LA, USA

• Journal Qualitative Sociology
• Online ISSN 1573-7837
• Print ISSN 0162-0436

Perception != reality

Faced with the appearance of two very partisan candidates, it is understandable that voters are registering their preferences earlier this year. The choices are clear—even if neither candidate is perceived as particularly close to the more centrist views of most American voters.

Aside from the problem that journalistic "centrism" in fact has little to do with the "views of most American voters," the fact is that the presidential contest (like most elections in the U.S.) is actually between a full-throated proponent of elite centrism and a slightly more resolutely right-wing practitioner of the same. The choice is not clear, in the sense that anything more than marginal differences in tax rates and regulatory enthusiasm and foreign policy would be the consequences of one side winning versus the other. 

Yes, just the same

"As usual the markets figured all this out long before I did.  The 2.6% yield on 30 year bonds is basically a forecast of future premature tightening by the Fed.  What I don’t understand is how markets can be so damn smart when they are composed on individuals who are individually quite stupid.  I suppose for the same reason that Albert Einstein’s brain was quite smart, despite being composed of neurons that are individually quite stupid."

Significant drawbacks, indeed

Who knew that serfdom was actually an institution of "contract enforcement."

Tracy Denison, "Contract Enforcement in Russian Serf Society," Economic History Review (2012)

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.

Despite the unfortunate wording, there's something to this. It makes sense for lords to provide some "public goods," such as adjudication and enforcement of private agreements among subjects. That's both because its value as a "concession" of sorts is probably above the actual cost of providing it, and because it's preferable to make "investments" to preserve some kind of political monopoly rather than letting people get too independent (or letting some other institution come in and provide the service instead).

misdiagnosis

Jack Goldstone:

Yet enormous and daunting as these problems are, these executives saw them as opportunities – opportunities to gain in reputation, to cultivate future customers and workers, even to save lives by supporting everything from emergency services and health care to augmenting food production and moving food and energy to where they are most needed.   Moreover, each of these outstanding executives already had projects at their companies that were addressing these problems; the real need was to scale them up, sustain them, and make them core elements of their overall corporate strategy.

All of us recognized that these problems were so large, so pervasive, and so woven into the operations of firms that government alone could not solve them; government alone does not have all the resources or the knowledge required to do the job.  Yet everyone also deplored the degree to which business and government have become at loggerheads today.   It is going to take public-private partnerships, as well as corporate initiatives, to develop solutions to these global problems that will be effective, sustainable, and efficient. The current atmosphere of mutual distrust and enmity between business and government has itself become a problem that needs to be resolved for America to move forward.   It is dreadful that the Democratic/Republican partisanship that is paralyzing our government is now paralleled by a government/business partisanship that is a drag on our economy and an obstacle to solving major social problems.

Still, I came away confident that the private sector is up to the challenges.  If these executives represent the future of private initiatives, and continue to have the backing of their boards and CEOs, America will have good reason to say “God Bless the Private Sector.”

Because public/private partnerships work so well. Because the U.S. government has been so willing to go against or without the cooperation of the "private sector." Because "Corporate Social Responsibility executives" aren't kept on the payroll essentially as a PR exercise.

Also: "Historically, America has flourished with limited government because businesses and business leaders have done much more than their European counterparts to support the communities and broader society in which they work." Which is cause, which is effect?

Cf. cynicism masquerading as a political strategy. Though I guess Goldstone isn't even trying to masquerade as anything he's not.

"a utility optimist and a revenue pessimist"

Tyler Cowen attaches that epithet to himself (specifically in the context of a story about Japanese baseball, of all things). The position on capitalism this implies is extremely interesting: it amounts to accepting the unavoidably crisis-prone character of the system, indeed its probable stagnation in the near future, while insisting that this will not be reflected in much concrete harm. In other words, we might be more anxious about our economic situations, we might feel less affluent, but in real terms our standards of living will continue to improve steadily.

That would be nice. I'm not sure it's born out by the experience of the U.S. and Europe in the past 4 years, though Japan is more arguable.

Marginal Revolution in full-on troll mode

Yikes:

If you think that the freedom to quit is without value bear in mind that under feudalism and into the early 19th century in the U.S. and a bit later in Britain employers and even potential employers could prevent workers from quitting and from moving. The freedom to quit was hard won. We should not disparage the liberation brought by a free market in labor.
* * *
A job is an exchange with mutual consent and benefits on both sides of the bargain. The freedom is in the right to exchange not in the price at which the exchange occurs. A worker who is paid for 8 hours of work is not a serf 1/3rd of the day. We all sell our labor and we would all like to sell at a higher price but that does not make any of us serfs. From the minimum wage waiter to the highly-paid sports superstar there is dignity in work freely chosen.

To understand freedom and true coercion let us remember that American workers have the freedom to bargain and exchange with American employers, a freedom that gun, barbed wire and electrified fence deny to many millions of less fortunate workers from around the world.

Yes, feudalism and current immigration policy are bad. Your point? Though, it is worth pointing out that both this post and Cowen's response before really harp on the quantitative trade-off dimension (i.e. that workers bargain for both wage and working conditions). The post they're criticizing takes a much more qualitative approach based on freedoms and rights; it does lead one to wonder whether ceding the quantitative ground (i.e. the position that employment contracts are bargained on a level field) is a good idea. Though it's probably these 2 economists' faults for not recognizing immediately that working conditions are often public goods.

More cynicism masquerading as a political strategy

An nyt op-ed asks, "How liberals win," and the answer is apparently, "By losing to corporations 2/3 of what they were originally seeking."

This is not really untrue. "Progressive" elected officials have immense difficulty accomplishing anything against the wishes of the business class. I like, by the way, how the author waves away everything accomplished by FDR in the "Second New Deal" over the implacable opposition of capital on the back of a huge labor upsurge.

Roosevelt may be remembered for his combativeness toward corporations; he famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” But he said that in 1936, only after key New Deal legislation had passed with the help of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association.

The thing is, NIRA wasn't really all that "key" in the long run: it failed to end the Depression and its labor provisions were essentially a dead letter. Maybe they helped to feed the strike wave that set the environment for the passage (and survival under challenges) of the NLRA. (Also, Johnson's signal achievements were a tax cut, some environment regulations, and the department of transportation? Riiiiight...)

So yes, absent that, it's immensely difficult to get anything done that corporations are intent on opposing relatively vigorously and unanimously. This doesn't actually mean that "working with" them, as Obama did, generated better outcomes. The criticism of Obama from the "progressive" wing of the Democratic party is not that he makes concessions, it's that he makes them pre-emptively and excessively. Sorry, but the stimulus and obamacare were not the New Deal. There's a difference between giving up a few things to get the big stuff through and giving up everything in return for a symbolic win.

This is a better response:

You see, giving corporations total control of politics does come with certain difficulties. Corporations are accustomed to getting their way on everything, but the problem with that is that they aren’t always good at compromising with each other. So what happens when one corporate interest comes into conflict with another? What happens when every corporation can’t win on every issue every time? It doesn’t happen often, of course, but occasionally it does happen. Here is where we still need the semblance of a government by and for and of the people: to cast the tie-breaking vote and figure out which corporate sector will get to have everything they desire. The health insurance industry wanted a health care law requiring citizens to buy its products, but the Chamber of Commerce represented businesses that didn’t want to take away from workers’ life and death dependence on their employers for health care. It was quite a pickle! Luckily, the helpful hand of the US government was able to step in and negotiate a compromise.
* * *
But despite this utterly reasonable state of affairs, there is one minor fly in the ointment: because things we want are simply not possible to achieve, we run into the problem that the word “win” threatens to fall out of common usage. Once we’ve accepted permanent defeat, what would that word be used to indicate? Luckily Scher has the answer: we’ll just change its meaning. We will use the word “win” to describe “whatever it is our side manages to do.”

Cynicism masquerading as a political strategy

Alan Scott, "Development Theory and the Constitution of Market Society: A Polanyian View" Comparative Sociology.

In its latter capacity [as "market modifier"] the state is, and indeed must be, the legitimate and prime target of claims making with respect to the defence of society, social groups and communities against self-regulating markets.

The dilemma for radical approaches is thus twofold: the non-appearance of its targeted addressees on the one hand, and the rejection of policy bodies and policy makers as potential addressees on the other. The result is that much of the left has evacuated the field of policy debate. This leaves us in a situation where we find, on the one side, a frequently Panglossian discourse of “good governance” and, on the other, self-marginalizing critique. The “neo-liberal” project has had a smooth ride through the middle. And yet, even those institutions and individuals charged with governing the latest wave of deregulation and the free flow of real and fictitious commodities have become increasingly aware of the adverse effects. So, the policy debate goes on, but it does so on a terrain on which a broadly Polanyian approach provides the best hope for defending communities and “social assets” against markets, and for supporting regulation. The price to pay for participating in such debates is a lowering of expectations: with no post-capitalist option in prospect and no realistic opt out from the international system at the national level, hopes must rest on a partial defence against the effects of markets; a partial reembedding of the economy. This is the context, rather than the brute fact of the current global financial crisis referred to at the start of the paper, that makes Polanyi’s analysis once more relevant: his position is closer to those (progressive) voices which do get heard in policy circles.

No political movement--whether based on class or nationalism--is to be realistically expected, and so if there is to be any blunting of neoliberalism, it is only going to be achieved by "participating in [policy] debates." When, where, and with whom is not entirely clear, but the implication is officials of states and other institutions "charged with governing the latest wave of deregulation and the free flow of real and fictitious commodities," which presumably includes the IMF and the World Bank, as well as aid agencies and major donors. In other words, moderate your demands and you'll have a shot at convincing elites of the necessity of "a partial defence against the effects of markets; a partial reembedding of the economy."

It's true that there don't appear to be more radical alternatives on the immediate horizon, but the author seems to be taking this as evidence that trying to convince officials has a chance of working. Saying that officials of international organizations are "increasingly aware of the adverse effects" of unrestrained markets is perhaps an understatement, but it is true that the neoliberal language of the World Bank (for instance) was seriously toned down beginning in the late 90s. However, it's not like the underlying ideology has changed, it's just expressed with more caution. Is there really an opening for a "Polanyian approach"? Has neoliberalism been ascendant for lack of convincing ideological competitors?

Considering the continued dominance of supposedly market-perfecting "structural reform" as the political agenda, for instance in Europe during its ongoing crisis, despite the repeated financial blowups of the past couple decades, one has to suspect that the policies keep getting put forward because despite their costs for most people, they've been working quite well for someone. Or perhaps, it'd be more accurate to say something--perhaps financial capital, perhaps transnational capital, perhaps nothing more complicated than each individual country's elites. If it's working fine for them, and if "defense" would entail at least constraining their interests, it going to be hard to convince the bureaucrats and intellectuals who have made careers giving them what they want that a new approach is needed. This is of course what social movements are for: the mechanism by which the injury to the interests of non-elite social groups is transmuted into a cost to the elites, giving them a compelling reason to accept the lasting but predictable costs of concessions.

The Political Process of Tokugawa-era Japan, in 2000 words

The Tokugawa house established itself as the hegemonic military power in Japan in 1600, and it formally received the title of feudal monarch (sei-i tai-shōgun) from the (essentially powerless) emperor in 1603. The authority of the Tokugawa rested, first, on its ruling by far the single largest domain, representing about a quarter of Japan’s agricultural productive capacity in the seventeenth century and, second, on the formal subordination of all other lords to it as vassals. The around 270 magnate lords held their domains as fiefs and were subject to the monarchy’s regulations, which focused on lords’ military capacity, their relations with each other, and the management of their personal households. Nonetheless, in practice the monarchy intervened relatively little in the lords’ rule of their domains. The Tokugawa periodically exercised the right to demand service from the lords—during the long period in which there was no need for military mobilization, this was primarily for various construction projects—but the monarchy did not tax the lords’ subjects directly.

The magnate lords—and the feudal monarchy in the territories it directly ruled—had the power to make and enforce laws and to impose and collect taxes in their domains. For this purpose, each domain had its own administrative and coercive apparatus, staffed by the lord’s hereditary vassal samurai. As late as the sixteenth century, the samurai had been a genuine class of self-equipped knights, holding fiefs from their lords and owing military service in return. However, over the course of the solidification of the Tokugawa-era political order, by the latter half of the seventeenth century the samurai had largely been converted into urban rentiers and civil officials. They lived in the capitals of their lords, and the vast majority received a fixed share of domain tax revenues rather than directly managing their own fiefs. There was a steep hierarchy of income and status among the samurai, with more powerful or prestigious offices restricted to men of a specific wealth and status level. Moreover, the number of samurai attached to each lord was fixed in line with the large armies of the late sixteenth century, and so there were far more candidates than positions in the domain administrations, leaving a large number of men in the relatively lower ranks of the samurai unemployed. Nonetheless, the samurai as a whole were clearly marked off from the population of commoners, who were excluded from service in domain administrations and military forces.

A side effect of pulling the samurai off the land into the castle-towns was that villages (and urban communities) were granted a great deal of day-to-day autonomy as long as they broadly followed the rulers' laws and (for villages) paid their taxes. This situation had the surface appearance of homogeneous peasant population clearly demarcated from a "warrior" stratum who lived by extracting the peasantry's surplus. In reality, the demarcation of the samurai from the "peasantry" in the 16th and 17th centuries left a stratum of small-scale landlords, who had been borderline "warriors" in the preceding era, in the villages. These gentry were formally "peasants," and they were effectively de-militarized by the solidification of the new political order, but they typically lived off the labor of tenants and dependent servants, in some cases retained certain symbolic privileges otherwise restricted to samurai (such as having a surname or carrying a sword), and were nearly universally named as village officials by the domain administrations. Their position was ambiguous, since on the one hand they were responsible for the collection and payment of taxes, which were assessed by the state on the village as a whole, and for ensuring that the peasants obeyed the lords' laws. They could be--and often were--punished by the lords for failure to do these things. Yet, they also paid taxes, and the domain administrations provided them with little in the way of resources to coerce the peasantry. Thus, at the same time as they were the bottom rung of the exploitative apparatus--and themselves exploiters of peasant labor--they both shared interests with the rest of the peasantry and were forced to bow to some extent to the will of the village community and to act as its representatives against the lords.

The fundamental purpose of these political institutions, which are typically known as the bakuhan system (referring to the combination of feudal monarchy = bakufu and domains = han), was to eliminate the tendencies towards destructive conflict within the ruling class that had characterized the centuries preceding the "unification" of the end of the 16th century. By establishing clearly the lines of authority and the distinct powers of different levels within the elite, the ruling class as a whole would be able to focus on living the good life on resources extracted from the productive classes, especially the peasantry. Indeed, on this criteria, it worked incredibly well, providing over two centuries without any serious, armed conflict within the class of lords.

Yet, it was not exempt from the crisis dynamics of a pre-capitalist social formation. For the first century or so, until the early 18th century, both the Japanese economy and the revenues of the ruling class grew comfortably. This was accomplished by an expanding area of arable land, filled by a growing population, paying proportionately increasing taxes. By the early 18th century, however, the availability of additional land for agricultural expansion had been mostly used up. The lords and their vassals, however, found it difficult to curtail their spending to match the newly constrained fiscal situation, and as a result debt (especially to the merchants who handled the transport and sale of tax-rice) expanded throughout the ruling class and some lords began the practice (that would become nearly universal) of cutting into the revenues of their vassals to fill holes in their own budgets.

The response of the lordly class, exemplified by the shogunate's "kyoho reforms" of the 1720s-30s, was to attempt to increase tax revenue, to constrain spending, and to hold down prices for consumer goods and luxuries both by fiat and by restricting commoner consumption. The results of these policies were mixed in the short run, but in the medium to long-term they could not be maintained and had deep unintended consequences. The increase in taxation came just as the reduced availability of new land was encouraging the fragmentation of land-holdings and reducing the margin of subsistence among the peasantry. In this context, protest against higher taxes could only be expected. Indeed, these protests were often led by the wealthy stratum of landowning gentry who were recognized as local village authorities by the domain administrations, since they too paid taxes to the lords.

However, the higher taxes had another, invidious effect on the peasantry. Through the early eighteenth century, the official policy of the shogunate and the magnate lords' domains was usually to encourage the establishment of peasants on independent, household-based subsistence plots in favor of the large gentry estates worked by dependent labor that had been common in the preceding period. This policy never removed inequality within the peasantry, but it did have visible consequences in the distribution of landownership. Yet, the imperative to increase tax revenue came into contradiction with this policy, since the lords' fiscal administrations lacked the capacity to specifically target higher taxes at the wealthiest rural residents--not least because this same gentry stratum typically controlled the distribution and collection of taxes within the villages as officials who simultaneously functioned as the conduit for lords' orders to peasants and represented the peasant communities to the lords. At best, tax increases would be distributed proportionately to landholdings--even though peasants with holdings barely sufficient to support their families in good years could much less afford to pay more--and often (if the recurrent complaints made by poor peasants are believed) the gentry foisted a disproportionate share of the tax burden on their poorer neighbors. Either way, the result was that the poorer and less lucky among the peasantry increasingly found themselves unable to pay their taxes in relatively poor years. In such a situation--unless it was bad enough that the entire village could be mobilized to demand a temporary reducing in the tax burden--the peasants' only option was to ask one their villages' wealthier families to fill the gap with a loan. These loans were typically secured by a fraction of the borrowers' landholdings. But, the interest on such a loan only made the peasants' situation that much more precarious, and it was quite common for such mortgaged land to become the property of the lender and the borrower a rent-paying tenant on his own land. The shogunate and the magnate lords' domains issued orders prohibiting such transactions and the concentration of land that resulted, but they were unwilling or unable to enforce them. The shogunate's prohibition on foreclosure was rescinded two years after it was issued. The lords would not challenge the position of the gentry, who they had in effect deputized to maintain rural order.

The second unintended consequences of the early-18th century "reforms" was that increasing competition for reduced lordly demand increased the impetus for the merchants and artisans of the great cities to seek out cheaper sources of raw materials or regionally produced goods in rural areas. Often, this entailed naming members of the gentry as purchasing agents, thereby linking these wealthy landholders into the Japan-wide commercial network that had grown up to fulfill the lordly demand that the bakuhan system concentrated in the various magnate lords' castle-towns and, above all, Edo. Over time, however, these gentry, even as landlordship and usury remained their primary (and most stable) sources of income, increasingly sought to break out of the subordinate position in which the urban merchants sought to keep them. These rural merchants accomplished this by developing their own expanded commercial networks, increasing the number of buyers with which they dealt or cutting out the middlemen to sell directly to the retailers of Edo, and by promoting proto-industrial by-employments like spinning and weaving among the peasantry. Since the peasants could accept lower wages precisely because they worked in handicrafts only as a side-line to agriculture, gentry proto-industrialists found they could easily undercut the established urban merchants and artisans.

The competition between the established merchants and the provincial and rural upstarts came to represent a signal fiscal opportunity for the lordly class. In return for assistance in assuring relatively open access to the consumer demand concentrated in Edo, rural merchants could be induced to pay back some of their profits to their lords. Conversely, the established merchants of Osaka and Edo would likewise be willing to pay the shogunate for protection of their privileged position in Japan's commercial network. However, these two fiscal strategies were contradictory: if individual domains were going to promote their own producers and merchants, that would have to come at the expense of the established merchants and producers. If the shogunate was to enforce the privileges of the merchants of Osaka, that would entail effectively restricting the activity of merchants and producers in the various domains. This contradiction was the root of the political conflict that accompanied the ascendancy of the shogunate official Tanuma Okitsugu in the latter half of the 18th century and ultimately led to his replacement by Matsudaira Sadanobu. Tanuma sought to assert the shogunate's primacy in fiscal and economic policy; the opposition of the magnate lords ultimately brought him down. Sadanobu's "Kansei reforms" adopted elements from and claimed the mantle of his grandfather the Shogun Yoshimune's Kyoho reforms, but to describe his policy as simply a "conservative reaction" is to miss the point of the conflicts within the ruling class. He removed Tanuma's commercial policies, but he himself as lord implemented policies to promote rural commerce in his own domain and did nothing to prevent other lords' doing the same. He wrote down samurai debt, but he also for the first time organized a merchant-financed and -administered emergency fund for the city of Edo.

From the end of the 18th century onwards, then, the various domains were given a largely free hand to experiment with commercial and economic policies in order to buttress their precarious fiscal positions. In order to formulate and administer these plans, the domains increasingly began to promote relatively low-ranking members of their vassal bands into positions of authority. For the first time since the formative period of the era, something like social mobility among the samurai became possible again, but in addition the trend of experimental commercial policies promoted an expansion of horizontal ties among the middle and lower strata samurai across domains. This arose directly from the orientation of the new policies to the national commercial network but also from the increasing circulation of students studying outside their domains and experts brought in to try to establish some new industry. The middle- and lower-ranked samurai who were appointed as reformists to influential offices were promoted because of their "ability," and this above all meant education, and the academic world of the latter half of the Tokugawa era cut across the boundaries of domain and vassal band.

In addition, what was new about the new commercial policies was not so much that they tried to draw fiscal benefits from cash crops and handicrafts; various domains had been doing that since the beginning of the era if not before. Instead, as an overall tendency, they entailed an even closer relation of cooperation between the domain administrations and the gentry. It was the latter who typically coordinated the introduction of new crops or industries in their localities, who administered programs for inspection or financial support, and, after all, who frequently were the merchants whose activity the domains were trying to encourage. If the lordly class had shied away from challenging the gentry in the first half of the 18th century, from the end of that century onwards they transformed and strengthened their alliance with that stratum. On paper, most domains still officially prohibited the alienation of peasants' lands and many discouraged (or even prohibited) peasants from cultivating crops other than rice or doing non-agricultural work, but in their actual practice they had broadly adapted to the new semi-commercialized economy.

All, however, was not well in the domains. For one thing, the basic problems of small holdings, a heavy tax burden, and debt leading to tenancy continued to plague the peasantry. If anything, the reconstituted alliance between the lords and the gentry only made matters worse, and increasingly, instead of being led in relatively formalized protests against taxes by village officials (i.e. the gentry), peasants attacked not just the domain administrations but also the merchants and landlords who exploited them in debt and tenancy. It is possible to discern especially in the 19th century a growing sense of unease at the threat of popular unrest throughout the elite, including not just samurai officials and intellectuals but also the gentry.

In addition, the fiscal situation of the domains was in many cases improved but far from good. The practice of "borrowing" from samurai stipends remained nearly universal, and periods of relatively healthy revenues and constrained expenses were typically followed by reversions to laxity and burgeoning debt. Politically, the possibility for promotion among relatively low-ranked vassals gave rise to the formation of factions that competed for office. Since appointment to office still depended ultimately on the arbitrary will of the lord, what the different factions competed for was his favor. Since, moreover, the tendency to appoint less elite vassals to office only modified but did not replace the entrenched influence of the lord's highest-ranked vassals--who of course had a vested interest in minimizing disruption to the status quo--their discontent with the policies of a particular clique in office was often sufficient to win its ouster and replacement by competitors. The result was a pattern of periodic reshuffling of the domain administrations, preventing the consistent implementation of reform programs (especially when those reforms challenged the interests of highest-ranked vassals).

I've come to really dislike Juan Cole

His Middle East commentary used to be interesting, but he's really turned out to be a partisan Democrat with some liberal interventionist leanings.

Supreme Court declines to take US Health Care in direction of Sub-Saharan Africa