Churn, Change and Religious Revivalism

By Ronnie D. Lipschutz

 

[I]n the seventeenth century…men were said to have a property not only in land and goods and in claims on revenue from leases, mortgages, patents, monopolies, and so on, but also a property in their lives and liberties (Macpherson, 1978: 7).

 

Whiteness is not simply and soley a legally recognized property interest.  It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood, and its relation to the law of property is complex (Harris, 1993: 1725).

 

As status hierarchies weaken, it takes considerably greater effort to keep subordinate groups subordinate and inferior meanings inferior.  Lower status groups feel able to assert themselves and demand greater respect.  Higher status groups experience increasing fears that they will suffer a corresponding loss of prestige in the non-Paretian world of social status.  People certain their superior social status may treat their social inferiors with indulgence and even paternal affection, but when the status barriers beging to break down, their rhetoric turns to fear, anger, and hate.  They can no longer afford the luxury of condescension (Balkin, 1997: 2334)

 

Introduction

This is a article about three, related topics: capitalism, property, and social movements.  There is a connection between capitalism, identities and social movements, one that is hardly captured by standard theories of resource mobilization or opportunity structures or “new social movements.”  In this book, I claim that there is a deep structural linkage between capitalism and the political behaviors of social forces organized in groups, one that arises from the alienating and commodifying tendencies of capital, on the one hand, and the struggles of individuals and groups to achieve and retain their autonomy-in-the-self, on the other.  This is not a deterministic argument; rather, it is about the constraints imposed on agents acting politically in marketized environments and how those agents confront, oppose and resist those constraints.

The dynamism of capitalism, ongoing power struggles among domestic and transnational social forces, and the actions or inactions of the American state constantly threaten to undermine established and long-standing hierarchies of power, wealth, and status, along with their ideological justification and the “common sense” they instill in bodies politic.  Individual and collective identities are deeply vested in both cultural and material aspects of daily and social life and, when some part of those identities appears threatened, a closing around other parts can develop. Indeed, as we shall see, such periods of disruption are often associated with what are generally called “industrial revolutions,” and they tend to revolve around conflicts within elites, over changing belief systems.[1]  For reasons having to do with the historical development of the nation-state, these belief systems have, historically, been rooted in religion—even though social and political elites are not themselves always particularly devout.  Thus, the great culture wars of the American past and the American present have been fought in largely religious terms, even though the sources and symptoms of conflict have been attributable, at least in part, to material transformations across society.

A New Vocabulary for Trade

By Jagdish Bhagwati

 

From Wall Street Journal – COMMENTARY, August 4, 2005; Page A12

 

Metaphors matter. They define how one sees reality, as when the phenomenon of skilled emigration turns into the problem of “brain drain,” evoking the image of a leaky faucet that few can regard with equanimity.

The phenomenon of globalization has prompted competing metaphors. The prolific Thomas Friedman talks everywhere, and writes in his latest best seller, of globalization being marked by a “flat world.” Writing almost a decade earlier in the New Republic, I advanced an alternative — and less demotic — metaphor, that globalization was characterized by “kaleidoscopic comparative advantage.” Let me explain why the two metaphors diverge dramatically and carry startlingly different policy implications — and why Mr. Friedman gets it wrong.

 

‘Geography Is History’

One cannot but be aware that countries face intensified competition in the world economy — a phenomenon that forced itself on our attention long before China and India began to loom large in fevered imaginations. Interest rates are less far apart than earlier: A continual opening and global integration of financial markets has occurred. Multinationals now consider many alternative locations for final assembly and to manufacture components, so their know-how becomes available, in effect, to several likely locations. Access to knowledge is more diffused than ever before: Student enrollments in foreign countries have grown, better educational institutions have opened in some developing countries, and the need for skilled professionals has led to shifts in immigration policies to draw them in to countries that have excess demand for their skills. Producers in distant places can now access markets thanks to the Internet, to the point where many talk melodramatically of the “death of distance,” and I say, with tongue partly in cheek, that “geography is history.”

Yet it is wrong to infer from this that the world has gone “flat,” and that there is no comparative advantage left. The notion of a flat world is as wrong metaphorically now as it was when Copernicus showed it to be literally wrong. To be more precise than his metaphor, Mr. Friedman has on his mind not the world but a large fraction of it — India and China. He believes that the gradient which the citizens of these countries had to climb to get to our shores and out-compete us has now disappeared, giving way to a level playing field that we ignore at our peril.

The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?(1)

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Rationality is, more than we admit, in the eye of the beholder. It has something to do with the optimal means to achieve a goal, any goal, what Weber called “formal rationality.” And it has something to do with the relative wisdom of the goal that is given priority, what Weber called “substantive rationality” (Rationalität materiell). I think it would be useful to approach the issue in terms of what I see as the three mental operations in which scholars/scientists necessarily engage when dealing with any topic. There is the intellectual task of attempting to discern what the phenomenon is, what were its origins, what are its links with other phenomena. what has been its trajectory, and what we may anticipate its future trajectory to be. In the modern world, this intellectual task has been the domain in which scholars/scientists are considered to be the specialists. It is they who regularly study the phenomena, develop their explanations, verify them to the extent that they can, and report their results to the wider community of scholars/scientists, and sometimes to the general public.

But assuming this is well done, or reasonably well done, we are not through with our mental operations. We have the necessary task of moral evaluation. Have the results of the past trajectory of the phenomenon enabled us to realize ends that we consider to be moral ends? Has the phenomenon been morally progressive, regressive, or neutral? What alternatives existed in the past that might have resulted in more substantively rational objectives? (And if they exist, why weren’t they taken, which is an intellectual question?) Most important of all, given the existing reality, in which direction ought we to be heading? Proponents of value-neutral objectivity have always insisted that this moral evaluation was outside the defined role of the scholar/scientist. But not all of us have agreed. Gunnar Myrdal (1958) laid great emphasis in his writings on what he called “value in social theory” and refused to segregate this moral task from that of intellectual analysis.⁽²⁾

Soft Multilateralism

by Immanuel Wallerstein (immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu)

 

[from the February 2, 2004 issue of The Nation]

The hawks around George W. Bush believed the United States had been in a slow decline for at least thirty years. Their remedy called for the United States to flex its considerable military muscle, abandon all pretense of multilateral consultations with hesitant and weak allies, and proceed to intimidate both friends and enemies alike. Then it would be in the world driver’s seat again. Instead, Iraq is a growing drain of lives and money, traditional allies are profoundly estranged, national security is more precarious than ever and economic power continues to erode. In short, the hawks have achieved the opposite of everything they intended on the world scene, except toppling Saddam Hussein.

Democratic presidential candidates and even Republican moderates are now calling for a return to the multilateralist foreign policy of previous administrations. They want to bring back the golden era of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Madeleine Albright. Is this a plausible alternative?

For the past thirty years, every administration, from Nixon to Clinton, including Reagan and Bush’s father, pursued the same basic strategy, a policy I call “soft multilateralism.” This policy had three elements: (1) offer our major allies “partnership”; (2) push hard to persuade potential nuclear powers not to “proliferate”; (3) persuade governments of the South that their economic future lay not in state-managed “development” but in export-oriented “globalization.” None of these policies were entirely successful, but each was at least partially so.