In his essay Voluntarism and Social Masses, Antonio Gramsci argues that "the actions and organizations of 'volunteers' must be distinguished from the actions and organisations of homogeneous social blocs, and judged by different criteria." He defines these "volunteers" as "those who have detached themselves from the mass by arbitrary individual initiative..."
His language of volunteers vs. organized social blocs aligns with a similar distinction often made between activism and organizing. Anyone can become an activist overnight, if he or she so desires. All you need to do is to start taking action as an individual on an issue you care about. I'm not about to be as dismissive as Gramsci seems to be in this essay about the value of such an act. However, he makes a good point: organizing is about finding other people to take action with you. But there's more - and here's where I find Gramsci's framework so helpful - organizing is not just about finding anyone to take action with you; it's about working to activate an already constituted social bloc and turn the bloc itself into the historical actor.
...we must not neglect to engage already existing cultural spaces. Sometimes we become disinterested in or even hostile toward such spaces because they house the values of the dominant culture. But these spaces also house the people. We cannot expect people to meet us where we want them to be. We have to meet them where they are, with the language they use, in the spaces they frequent.
Entering existing networks and institutions allows the people within them to consider taking action to end the war without feeling that they would have to lose their identity to do so. They can take action as teachers, or union members, or students, or members of a religious community. They do not have to become an "activist"-a distinct identity that many people are uncomfortable claiming-in order to take action. Instead they can begin to imagine working to end the war as an expression of who they already are, alongside people they already know.
This is one of the biggest lessons from US social movements in the 1960s and 1970s: movements usually grow (in size and capacity) quickly not by building their own separate infrastructure from scratch, but by organizing within existing social networks and institutions until they identify strongly enough with the movement that their already existing infrastructure and resources go to work for movement ends. The Civil Rights Movement spread like wildfire and dramatically increased its capacity when black churches and traditionally black schools came to identify themselves as part of a movement. People didn't have to leave their social networks to become part of the movement. Rather, membership in these institutions came to imply movement participation. These institutions and networks then used their resources-most significantly people power-to further movement goals.
In my previous diary, "Fool's gold", I wrote about Paul Krugman's blog post from last week, "The War on Demand". After quoting a bit from Krugman's set-up, (shortened version):
.... it's becoming clear that many people don't so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can't possibly believe what I'm saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment - never mind that all I'm saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.
So what's going on here?
I summarized:
Krugman went on to suggest three things: First, there's a basic inability to see how shortfalls in demand are even possible. Although Krugman doesn't realize it, this derives in part from arrested cognitive development, explicable in terms of Kegan's typology. Put simply, Level 3 thinking, in which the individual is the product of their social surround, cannot stand outside of itself, and comprehend the social system as a system. And that is what you must be able to do in order to understand shortfalls in demand. Second, there's a fixation on Strict Father monetary morality--although, again, Krugman doesn't explicitly discuss the Strict Father angle as such. Third, there's a failure of traditional Friedmanite monetarists to realize that they are "part of the problem" in they eyes of the newly-emergent demand-deniers.
In that diary, I focused on the first item, tying it to a Kegan-style analysis of the role of cognitive complexity. I had already discussed the issue of moral economic visions before. But now I want to talk about the relationship between the two.
You see, the problem with folks like Obama is not that they want to try to mediate between liberals and conservatives. After all, the central liberal values of tolerance and respect for individual conscience are heavily slanted toward favoring such mediation. No, the problem is that Obama wants to mediate on the lowest possible level of cognitive complexity--and conservatives, of course, just keep dragging that level down, down, down the dark ladder, as Joanie Mitchell would say.
In Kegan's typology, Level 4 corresponds with modernism, self-authorship, and ideology. It is the level at which the individual steps back from society and makes their own decisions about what is right and just--and takes responsibility for doing so. Level 3 is the level of traditionalism, where one simply accepts the social world as one finds it. These two levels correspond quite well to traditional liberalism and conservatism. And while it's certainly true that traditional society has liberal as well as conservative content to it (just read the Gospels, if you have any doubt), once one fastens on to autonomy as a central liberal value, it should be quite obvious that one cannot fairly ask a liberal to "compromise" with conservatives using a Level 3 framework that not only denies the value of autonomy, but that cannot even really grasp it.
Of course one could make a similar argument about the unfairness of asking conservatives to compromise with liberals using a Level 4 framework. As I discussed in "Fools gold", anyone operating at a lower level will be unable to really grasp crucial concepts that are central to the next-highest level.
Which is why, really, one simply can't accept conservatives as equal bargainers, mo matter how much one might want to. This does not, however, mean that one must reject paying any attention to them. It's simply that one can't grant them the sort of dominating and defining role that they naturally seek and assume, based on their Level 3 logic of defining the self in terms of society, and assuming that this justifies their view and their view alone as "right" and "natural".
As an example of what I'm driving at, consider the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which Gingrich abolished when he became Speaker in 1995. The OTA provided an objective screening process to create a common foundation for policy discussions. And Gingrich just hated that--as well he should, raging egomaniacal narcissist that he is. And here we have to distinguish between two distinct strands of conservatism: the moderate conservatism of Edmund Burke and the reactionary conservatism of Joseph de Maistre....
David Waldman aka KagroX wrote an excellent post at Daily Kos last night about just how potentially big a net the theory underlying this bill could cast. Very wide, wide enough to get a whale.
Again I quote him.
" Take the rape provisions out, and you're left with a bill that paves the way for using the tax code to select every American's health care options for them, direct from Washington."
Here's his piece "H.R. 3 hides even bigger dangers than redefinition of rape"
The bill lays the groundwork for the radical right to target every social and economic advance that they don't like. And they don't like much. They are redefining the purpose of the tax code. Taxes are meant to raise money and to apportion fairly the burdens and benefits of government. Taxes have been used to promote innovation like the R&D credit. Or not like the oil depletion allowance or agricultural subsidies. The tax code has been used to allow religious groups to sustain their mission - to worship and to make the world a better place.
The tax code as we can see from the church/synagogue/mosque friendly provisions have long served social goals as well. But that can now be used to go after social goods.
In H.R. 3, Republicans revive the mid-90s "Istook amendment" theory of the fungibility of money to include under their definition of "taxpayer funding for abortion" all tax deductions, credits or other benefits for the cost of health insurance, when that insurance includes under its plan coverage for abortion.
So if a company provides health care benefits for its employees, and the plan they pay for includes coverage for abortion, the company becomes ineligible for the normal federal tax deductions and credits that are the usual reward for providing benefits. That's a gigantic tax increase. If you pay for your own coverage directly, no deductions, credits, etc. for you, either, if the plan you select offers abortion coverage. Whether you or someone on your plan ever gets one or not. All deductions associated with your health care costs are disallowed.
That, apparently, will impact approximately 87 percent of private insurance plans on the market today.
That would be a huge tax increase. So they would be using a tax increase to bring about one social change they have long pursued. But they can do the same in many other areas. What are some of them?
Basically everyone but more after the fold from me and I quote David first.
As the Obama administration continues to treat the U.S.-taxpayer-financed dictator Hosni Mubarak with kid gloves, media outlets like Salon have rightly pointed out that our support of undemocratic tyrants is not limited to Egypt. It has become more the norm than the exception. The question is: why? Why are we, a supposed beacon of democracy, so invested in so many dictatorships?
Obviously, there are many answers to that question. Some of it has to do with imperial aspirations, as taboo as that is to even mention. Some of it has to do with good ol' fashioned Big Money lobbying, as I showed yesterday. And some of it has to do with what Dr. Martin Luther King identified in his Riverside Church speech: We back dictators over democracy because we "refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments" -- profits often guaranteed by dictators where they wouldn't be so guaranteed by popularly elected governments.
As powerful as these motives are, however, there is still one other factor at play: addiction.
Dictators are, in a way, like a drug. We start out backing them, perhaps thinking it will be a momentary alliance, just like a person might take a single hit from the pipe. But then, the subjugated population begins to revolt, just like the body begins to revolt without the drug. So we start intensifying our support for the dictator to keep the increasingly restive population down, just like the addict starts to consume more drugs to prevent the body from going into a more painful withdrawal.
This cycle of addiction then snowballs (to badly mix metaphors). The more angry the subjugated population becomes at the dictator and us for backing him, the more we feel an urgency to help prop up the dictator for fear of an ever-more powerful backlash against that dictator and, by extension, us. It's like the addict thinking the only way to survive and mitigate pain is to keep upping the dosage.
Of course, the only way to truly fix the problem is some sort of intervention -- to break the cycle on our own terms, rather than effectively overdose. Instead of, say, unendingly backing dictators like the Shah of Iran until the repression creates the condition for a catastrophic fundamentalist revolution (overdose), we should be looking for ways to proactively break this addiction cycle completely as a way to avoid such catastrophe.
That's what the Egypt protests still (amazingly) provides us right now -- a way to break that cycle without helping to further create the conditions for catastrophe. Right now, we have an out -- protests in the street still give us a fleeting opportunity to back away from our addiction to dictatorship (in this case, the Mubarak dictatorship). Incredibly (and thankfully), despite our 30 year backing of Mubarak, it doesn't seem like we are at that overdose point yet -- that point of, say, an Iran-style revolution based on raw anti-American anger. And indeed, if we are truly worried about an Iran-style conflagration in Egypt, the best way to try to avoid it isn't to back the dictator creating such a backlash - it's to stop backing the dictator.
Certainly, there will be unpleasant moments if we finally decide break our dictator addiction -- just like its painful for the junkie to go cold turkey, we may feel uncomfortable with newly democratic governments choosing to do things we don't like. But if we continue taking more hits of Mubarak's dictator drug, we will be doing our part to guarantee that much more painful overdose, because we will be further aligning ourselves with the regime the subjugated Egyptian populace so despises. And more generally, if we perpetuate this cycle of dictator addiction by continuing to so forcefully back all those other dictatorships around the globe, we will be helping guarantee other overdoses in the future.
The progressive movement is at a challenging but fascinating time in our country's history. Even when the Democrats had a newly elected President who ran on a platform of big change, 60 votes in the Senate, a big margin of control in the House and the most progressive Speaker in history, we still had trouble getting big changes passed. We accomplished some important things, but not nearly as much or as progressively as we had hoped. Now, with a Republican House, only 53 Democratic senators, and a President who has signaled he wants to move more to the center, progressives have even less power than before.
There's one other factor that even this old-school, lefty populist needs to acknowledge at this moment in our political history: While most voters remain very angry at Wall Street, health insurance companies, big businesses that keep outsourcing jobs, and other corporate special interests, they also are very angry with a government that seems pretty dysfunctional. Swing voters in particular are generally tired of traditional political arguments, and just want political leaders who are going to be very pragmatic about actually delivering jobs and other tangible economic benefits. In this environment, progressives should not shy away from making populist arguments, but need to temper that populism with a pragmatic message about helping small businesses and manufacturers create more jobs.
Things can change rapidly in politics (just ask Hosni Mubarak), but in the foreseeable future, if we want to make any progress in the legislative or regulatory arena, progressives will need to frame their ideas in new ways and look for alliances that go beyond the usual suspects. I have even given a name to this strategy: entrepreneurial populism. The idea is to continue to take on Wall Street and the other big corporate interests that have sweetheart deals with the government, but to do it on behalf of middle-class homeowners and entrepreneurial small businesses.
I find urban studies fascinating, which is perhaps why it was a concentration back when I was in school. To me--perhaps because I have lived in big cities most of my life--finding ways to reform city government, bring transparency, better deliver services and improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas is a passion, because I think there are so many possibilities (especially with today's technology) for making people's lives better by rising up to meet these challenges.
This is why I am thrilled to be working with the City Forward initiative. What is City Forward? It is a tool that pulls public data from urban centers on different issues (user specified) and displays it in customizable graphs.
For example, users can create an 'exploration' for important environmental issues such as water usage in multiple cities, and then have it displayed in charts that will visually present the data in a way that people can understand it. These charts allow anyone to make a case or tell a story about what one city or many cities are doing to improve in an areas such as this one, and what others are neglecting.
In other words, in addition to being groundbreaking in its potential applications, its a pretty cool tool for improving government transparency and letting people access public records in a useful, understandable way.
You can go to the site and see what explorations have already been done in cities across the world, and come up with some of your own. And you can encourage your city to share data with the initiative, to fight for the kind of improvements we all need, and quite frankly, deserve.
This is just provides another way to bring some light into the often dark corners of government, while improving our everyday lives. Not a bad thing in today's world, for sure.
I've been thinking laterly about the irrational belief in gold as some sort of magical metal, the only proper foundation for a money system. For a long time now, the most prominent gold bug has been Ron Paul, whose irrationality on the subject is underscored by the fact that he styles himself bas both a populist and a history buff as well. But, of course, historically the populists were deeply opposed to the gold standard. They were bimetalists, and the most famous speech related to the issue was William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech. As Paul's general confusion on the matter suggests, gold buggism is usually not a matter of an isolated mistaken belief. Rather, it's more of indicator, a tip-of-the-iceberg sort of thing. Which is why evidence is almost always utterly useless in dealing with goldbugs. A couple more pieces of such evidence popped up this past week.
Gold is perceived to have two useful purposes: one, as a hedge against inflation and two, as a hedge against uncertainty.
The world has been plenty uncertain throughout the month of January. First, a revolution kicked Tunisian President Ben Ali out of power. Next, protests took Egypt by storm, with its leader, Hosni Mubarak, being challenged.
While you would assume a major political event for one of the most influential players in the Middle East would trigger a surge in gold as a hedge against uncertainty, it hasn't.
Gold has declined this month, and only moved slightly higher in the wake of the protests (things really kicked off on January 17th, with a protester setting himself on fire in Cairo). Gold moved higher after the first big protests, but then moved lower, and has flatlined since.
Egyptian CDS, protection on the country's sovereign debt, has spiked and stayed high since the protests began.
One of the discouraging features of economic debate today - maybe it was always thus, but it seems especially intense now - is how much of it rests on "facts" that aren't, but which become articles of faith....
Anyway, one alleged fact I keep hearing is that recessions were short and shallow under the gold standard. I don't know where that's coming from, but it just ain't so. The data aren't as good for the pre-1933 era as they are now, but for what it's worth they suggest that there were a number of nasty, prolonged slumps under the gold standard. In particular, the Panic of 1893 was associated with a double-dip recession that left industrial production depressed and unemployment high for more than 5 years. Here's the estimated unemployment rate from Historical Statistics Millennial Edition:
But both these examples are of secondary importance compared to this self-explanatory chart, published in various different forms over a period of months (this colorful version from Matt Yglesias):
The fact that going off the gold standard was essential to recovering from the Great Depression is the death knell of gold bugism, from a rational standpoint.
But, of course, what's rationality got to do with economics these days? Which brings me to something Krugman wrote last week, "The War on Demand", which might as well be called "The War on Macro-econmics", which is roughly the equivalent of the "War on Evolution" or the "War on Global Warming", although it appears to be far less intentionally organized:
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Last night, Rachel Maddow gave a brilliant introduction to her show, dissecting the Mubarak strategy of first alleging, then fomenting violence in order to represent himself as the only possible savior--and presenting it in the context of other similar examples, from Tiananmen Square to the stymied 2009 Iranian Revolution. It was about as incisive and on-point as American network tv ever gets:
But then, of course, she shifted to live coverage of the unfolding street battles around Tahrir Square, and it became heartbreakingly clear that Mubarak had gotten what he was aiming for: his thugs had created a state of escalating chaos that Mubarak could use to argue that he alone could solve the immediate crisis that he alone had caused.
What also became heartbreakingly clear was the utter and thorough incompetence of the Obama Administration, which flows directly out of his Burkean conservative governing philosophy. Just as Obama's first two years were dominated by his somnambulistic choice of an economic team composed almost entirely of those who had caused, enabled or mis-managed the crisis he inherited, it now seems ominously all-but-certain that his next two years will be haunted by an analogous foreign policy disaster--sharply, painfully at odds with the promising picture he painted early on with his historical Cairo speech early in his presidency.
Burkean conservatism is based on the idea that the existing status quo--based on centuries of tradition--is inherently worthy of deference, as are the elites who preside over it, and that any change should be gradual and incemental, undertaken only after a comprehensive consensus has been achieved. This philosophy never made much sense in Burke's time, itself a period of tumultuous change, and makes less sense in our time. But that is clearly Obama's underlying philosophy, as utterly unsuited to reality as it may be.
Because he shunned creative, critical, inquisitive, independent-minded advisors in virtually every area of governance, Obama has virtually assured that he will fail in one area after another. In foreign policy, as we are seeing right now, he has yet to show any evidence of thinking even one silly millimeter outside the disastrous parameters of Bush's "long war"--and because of that, it is axiomatically impossible for him to come up with a coherent policy response to the problems we face--much less come up with pro-active initiative.
[O]fficials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House were running various scenarios across the region in an effort to keep up with events.
What would the covert American war in Yemen look like if the supportive Yemeni president were to be forced out? Will Mr. Mubarak's successor duplicate his support of the Middle East peace process? Will the shifts in the region benefit Islamic extremists, who will try to capitalize on unrest, or will it show the Arab street the power of a secular uprising?
The obvious problem here is that no one thought to run such scenarios before the last 24 hours. But the deeper problem is the no one seems to have thought about such scenarios and reached the obvious conclusion that the entire foreign policy approach was delusional, and needed to be scrapped without a trace.
None of this means that Obama won't get re-elected. After all, Bush managed that trick, despite an equally abysmal record of failures. But it does mean that people need to shake off their illusions born of listening to Obama speechify. Instead, they need to focus like a laser on what he actually does--and utterly fails to do. He has inherited deeply failed policies on every front, and has proposed only the most modest, Burkean of changes. It is a recipe for catastrophic disaster. Bad as things may stand now, they are poised to get tragically worse.
Where is the Obama people thought they were voting for? Surely, he could save us. If only he actually existed.
Many of you have now heard about the right's inflammatory redefinition of rape. You may or may not realize that it is only one part of another truly extreme bill, HR #3, The No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act. This bill is codifies the Hyde Amendment and eliminates aboriton coverage in all insurance. Let's be clear. They are not redefining rape in a court of law. They are only doing it in the context of the exceptions outlined in the Hyde Amendment. That is heinous enough, especially since the standard they want is to return was an older, vicious standard that they persecuted rape victims with. It is rape only if it's forcible rape. That was once the bruised, battered and bloodied standard. If you didn't fight back hard enough, then it's not rape.
Since 1977, the standard exceptions in the Hyde amendment were rape, incest and life and health of the mother. The health exception was eliminated a while ago, though it would periodically make a comeback. If you qualified under any of those, you as a poor woman could still get funding to get an abortion. They are also vindictively narrowing the incest exception. If you're an adult it wouldn't apply. When is incest not incest? When you are 18. It could be a Jeopardy question. Actually we are all in jeopardy....not just women, but all of us.
You have gotten many emails I am sure from some of the national choice groups, certainly from the DCCC. I am sure they make your blood boil. Cong. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said that this provision was an assault against women.
"It is absolutely outrageous," Wasserman Schultz said in an exclusive interview late Monday afternoon. "I consider the proposal of this bill a violent act against women."
She is right but the entire bill is violence against women, not just the rape provision.
As Digby has written this provision is a negotiating ploy by the right that our side should not fall for. Nor should we let the politicians on our side declare war only on this smaller battle. There is a much larger war going on.
On Wednesday, the Mubarak regime showed its fangs, mounting a massive and violent repressive attack on the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. People worrying about Egypt becoming like Iran (scroll down) should worry about Egypt already being way too much like Iran as it is. That is, Hillary Clinton and others expressed anxiety in public about increasing militarization of the Iranian regime and use of military and paramilitaries to repress popular protests. But Egypt is far more militarized and now is using exactly the same tactics.
The outlines of Hosni Mubarak's efforts to maintain regime stability and continuity have now become clear. In response to the mass demonstrations of the past week, he has done the following:
1. Late last week, he first tried to use the uniformed police and secret police to repress the crowds, killing perhaps 200-300 and wounding hundreds.
2. This effort failed to quell the protests, and the police were then withdrawn altogether, leaving the country defenseless.... The public dealt with this threat of lawlessness by organizing self-defense neighborhood patrols, and continued to refuse to stop demonstrating.
3. Mubarak appointed military intelligence ogre Omar Suleiman vice president.....
4. Mubarak mobilized the army to keep a semblance of order, but failed to convince the regular army officers to intervene against the protesters....
5. When the protests continued Tuesday, Mubarak came on television and announced that he would not run for yet another term and would step down in September. His refusal to step down immediately and his other maneuvers indicated his determination, and probably that of a significant section of the officer corps, to maintain the military dictatorship in Egypt....
6. When this pledge of transition to a new military dictator did not, predictably enough, placate the public either, Mubarak on Wednesday sent several thousand secret police and paid enforcers in civilian clothing into Tahrir Square to attack the protesters with stones, knouts, and molotov cocktails, in hopes of transforming a sympathetic peaceful crowd into a menacing violent mob. This strategy is similar to the one used in summer of 2009 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to raise the cost of protesting in the streets of Tehran, when they sent in basij (volunteer pro-regime militias). Used consistently and brutally, this show of force can raise the cost of urban protesting and gradually thin out the crowds.
Note that this step number 6 required that the army agree to remain neutral and not to actively protect the crowds. The secret police goons were allowed through army checkpoints with their staves, and some even rode through on horses and camels. Aljazeera English's correspondent suggests that the military was willing to allow the protests to the point where Mubarak would agree to stand down, but the army wants the crowd to accept that concession and go home now.
It may just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think that the army has made a grave miscalculation, potentially destroying its heretofore unparalleled positive stature in Egyptian society. Mubarak has nihilistically shown himself to be willing to destroy Egyptian society rather than leave in peace. The army appears to be tacitly backing this nihilistic play.
As Cole has explained in his immediately previous post, "Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979", the fear of a fundamentalist takeover is entirely misplaced in today's Egypt. But if the army blocks this unprecedented broad concensus of the Egyptian people, there is simply no telling what sort of future havoc they are sowing, be it five years in the future or a full generation.
I do not expect any sort of benevolence or far-sightedness from the Egyptian military. Military organizations are not known for such things. But I do hope, simply, that strong enough elements in the Egyptian army value their unique status in Egyptian society to do the right thing, and thus reaffirm that that status has been justly earned, and should live on through history.
The question, really, is whether they warriors--men of honor--or merely good soldiers who do as they are told. We forever hear so much about warriors, and forever see so little.
All the more reason that Egypt's army should surprise us all, and cover themselves in glory.
As Sun Tzu says, the greatest victory is won without firing a shot.
STATE BLOGS
