By Ian Angus

Climate & Capitalism

Sep 07, 2022

In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book.

It is also a continuing source of confusion and debate. Literally dozens of articles have tried to explain what “primitive accumulation” really meant. Did it occur only in the distant past, or does it continue today? Was “primitive” a mistranslation? Should the name be changed? What exactly was “Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation”?

In this article, written for my coming book on The War Against the Commons, I argue that Marx thought “primitive accumulation” was a misleading and erroneous concept. Understanding what he actually wrote shines light on two essential Marxist concepts: exploitation and expropriation.

This is a draft, not my final word. I look forward to your comments, corrections and suggestions.

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On June 20 and 27, 1865, Karl Marx gave a two-part lecture to members of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in London. In clear and direct English, he drew on insights that would appear in the nearly-finished first volume of Capital, to explain the labor theory of value, surplus value, class struggle, and the importance of trade unions as “centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.”1 Since an English translation of Capital wasn’t published until after his death, those talks were the only opportunity that English-speaking workers had to learn those ideas directly from their author.

While explaining how workers sell their ability to work, Marx asked rhetorically how it came about that there are two types of people in the market–capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who must sell their labor-power in order to survive.

How does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood?

A full answer was outside the scope of his lecture, he said, but “the inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation,’ but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.”

“We should find that this so-called Original Accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour.… The Separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.”

Marx was always very careful in his use of words. He didn’t replace accumulation with expropriation lightly. The switch is particularly important because this was the only time he discussed the issue in English–it wasn’t filtered through a translation.

In Capital, the subject occupies eight chapters in the part titled Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation–later rendered in English translations as “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Once again, Marx’s careful use of words is important–he added “so-called” to make a point, that the historical processes were not primitive and not accumulation. Much of the confusion about Marx’s meaning reflects failure to understand his ironic intent, here and elsewhere.

In the first paragraph he tells us that ‘ursprüngliche’ Akkumulation is his translation of Adam Smith’s words previous accumulation. He put the word ursprüngliche (previous) in scare quotes, signaling that the word is inappropriate. For some reason the quote marks are omitted in the English translations, so his irony is lost.

In the 1800s, primitive was a synonym for original–for example, the Primitive Methodist Church claimed to follow the original teachings of Methodism. As a result, the French edition of Capital, which Marx edited in the 1870s, translated ursprüngliche as primitive; that carried over to the 1887 English translation, and we have been stuck with primitive accumulation ever since, even though the word’s meaning has changed.

Marx explains why he used so-called and scare quotes by comparing the idea of previous accumulation to the Christian doctrine that we all suffer because Adam and Eve sinned in a distant mythical past. Proponents of previous accumulation tell an equivalent nursery tale:

Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. … Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.

“Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defense of property,” but when we consider actual history, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” The chapters of So-called Primitive Accumulation describe the brutal processes by which “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”

These newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx’s account focuses on expropriation in England, because the dispossession of working people was most complete there, but he also refers to the mass murder of indigenous people in the Americas, the plundering of India, and the trade in African slaves–“these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” That sentence, and others like it, illustrate Marx’s consistently sarcastic take on primitive accumulation. He is not describing primitive accumulation, he is condemning those who use the concept to conceal the brutal reality of expropriation.

Failure to understand that Marx was polemicizing against the concept of “primitive accumulation” has led to another misconception–that Marx thought it occurred only in the distant past, when capitalism was being born. That was what Adam Smith and other pro-capitalist writers meant by previous accumulation, and as we’ve seen, Marx compared that view to the Garden of Eden myth. Marx’s chapters on so-called primitive accumulation emphasized the violent expropriations that laid the basis for early capitalism because he was responding to the claim that capitalism evolved peacefully. But his account also includes the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the Highland Clearances in capitalist Scotland, the colonial-created famine that killed a million people in Orissa in India in 1866, and plans for enclosing and privatizing land in Australia. All of these took place during Marx’s lifetime and while he was writing Capital. None of them were part of capitalism’s prehistory.

The expropriations that occurred in capitalism’s first centuries were devastating, but far from complete. In Marx’s view, capital could not rest there–its ultimate goal was “to expropriate all individuals from the means of production.”2 Elsewhere he wrote of big capitalists “dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.”3 In other words, expropriation continues well after capitalism matures.

We often use the word accumulation loosely, for gathering up or hoarding, but for Marx it had a specific meaning, the increase of capital by the addition of surplus value,4 a continuous process that results from the exploitation of wage-labor. The examples he describes in “So-called Primitive Accumulation” all refer to robbery, dispossession, and expropriation–discrete appropriations without equivalent exchange. Expropriation, not accumulation.

In the history of capitalism, we see a constant, dialectical interplay between the two forms of class robbery that Peter Linebaugh has dubbed X2–expropriation and exploitation.

Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground, so to speak, it intensifies exploitation.5

Expropriation is open robbery. It includes forced enclosure, dispossession, slavery and other forms of theft, without equivalent exchange. Exploitation is concealed robbery. Workers appear to receive full payment for their labor in the form of wages, but in fact the employer receives more value than he pays for.

What Adam Smith and others described as a gradual build up of wealth by men who were more industrious and frugal than others was actually violent, forcible expropriation that created the original context for exploitation and has continued to expand it ever since. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature:

Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation.6

In short, Marx did not have a “theory of primitive accumulation.” He devoted eight chapters of Capital to demonstrating that the political economists who promoted such a theory were wrong, that it was a “nursery tale” invented to whitewash capital’s real history.

Marx’s preference for “original expropriation” wasn’t just playing with words. That expression captured his view that “the expropriation from the land of the direct producers–private ownership for some, involving non-ownership of the land for others–is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”7

The continuing separation of humanity from our direct relationship with the earth was not and is not a peaceful process: it is written in letters of blood and fire.

That’s why he preceded the words “primitive accumulation” by “so-called.”

Notes:
1 Quotations from Marx’s 1865 lectures, “Value, Price and Profit,” are from Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 20, 103-149. Quotations from “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” are from Marx, Capital vol. 1 (Penguin, 1976) 873-940.
2 Marx, Capital vol. 3, (Penguin, 1981) 571.
3 Ibid, 349.
4 See chapters 24 and 25 of Capital vol. 1.
5 Linebaugh, Stop Thief! (PM Press, 2014), 73.
6 Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020), 36.
7 Marx, Capital vol. 3 (Penguin, 1981) 948. Emphasis added.

About Ian Angus
Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

Stacy Czyzewski checks a machine that can manufacture complex aerospace components at Pioneer Service Inc. in Addison, Ill. Photographs by David Kasnic for The Wall Street Journal

THE NEW LEFT’S ‘NEW WORKING CLASS THEORY’ FROM 1968 HAS FINALLY SHOWN UP. Within three years, U.S. manufacturing workers with college degrees will outnumber those without

By Austen Hufford
Wall Street Journal

Dec. 9, 2019 – College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor.

New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found.

Within the next three years, American manufacturers are, for the first time, on track to employ more college graduates than workers with a high-school education or less, part of a shift toward automation that has increased factory output, opened the door to more women and reduced prospects for lower-skilled workers.

“You used to do stuff by hand,” said Erik Hurst, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. “Now, we need workers who can manage the machines.”

U.S. manufacturers have added more than a million jobs since the recession, with the growth going to men and women with degrees, the Journal analysis found. Over the same time, manufacturers employed fewer people with at most a high-school diploma.

Employment in manufacturing jobs that require the most complex problem-solving skills, such as industrial engineers, grew 10% between 2012 and 2018; jobs requiring the least declined 3%, the Journal analysis found.

At Pioneer Service Inc., a machine shop in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Ill., employees in polo shirts and jeans, some with advanced degrees, code commands for robots making complex aerospace components on a hushed factory floor.

The Factory floor at Pioneer Service Inc.

That is a far cry from work at Pioneer in the 1990s, when employees had to wear company uniforms to shield their clothes from the grease flying off the 1960s-era manual machines used to make parts for heating-and-cooling systems. Pioneer employs 40 people, the same number in 2012. Only a handful of them are from the time when simple metal parts were machined by hand.

“Now, it’s more tech,” said Aneesa Muthana, Pioneer’s president and co-owner. “There has to be more skill.”

How can U.S. manufacturing workers be saved from the spread of robots? Join the conversation below.

Pioneer, which makes parts for Tesla vehicles and other luxury cars, had its highest revenue last year, Ms. Muthana said. The company’s success mirrors that of other manufacturers that survived the financial crisis.

Improvements in manufacturing have made American factories more productive than ever and, despite recent job growth, require a third fewer workers than the nearly 20 million employed in 1979, the industry’s labor peak.

Manufacturers added 56,000 jobs this year compared with 244,000 jobs through this time last year. Automation and competition from lower-wage countries have contributed to declining U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Specialized job requirements have narrowed the path to the middle class that factory work once afforded. The new, more advanced manufacturing jobs pay more but don’t help workers who stopped schooling early. More than 40% of manufacturing workers have a college degree, up from 22% in 1991.

“The workers that remain do much more cognitively demanding jobs,” said David Autor, an economics professor at MIT.

Looking ahead, investments in automation will continue to expand factory production with relatively fewer employees. Jobs that remain are expected to be increasingly filled by workers from colleges and technical schools, leaving high-school graduates and dropouts with fewer opportunities. Manufacturing workers laid-off in years past also will see fewer suitable openings.

“It’s just not the case that bringing back manufacturing will be good for low-and-middle-skill workers,” said Mr. Hurst, who along with colleagues have studied the increasing demands of factory workers.

Robot wranglers

Advantage Conveyor Inc. in Raleigh, N.C., spent more than $2 million over the past decade on machines that cut and bend metal and plastics for the conveyor belts it builds. New machines allow technicians to make more parts per worker compared with the era when employees fashioned parts by hand.

Some of the workers were reassigned; others were laid off. “All of that menial labor moved to skilled labor,” said Vann Webb, company president. “You virtually have to have a two-year degree to work in our shop.”

Joshua Dallons, 28 years old, had hoped to become a nuclear engineer, but juggling college classes and a 30-hour-a-week grocery job was too much.

“I had that crisis,” Mr. Dallons said. “Do I want to keep pursuing engineering, or do I want to pursue this sort of job where I can quickly get into the field and quickly start making money?”

He decided to complete a training program in welding and was hired by Advantage in 2014. Mr. Dallons now works at a computer, designing conveyor layouts. He makes more than $25 an hour.

Large manufacturers also are tilting their workforce toward higher skilled, educated employees. Around 70% of new hires this year at Honeywell International Inc. ’s aerospace business have at least an associate degree, said Darren Kosel, a Honeywell plant manager.

The company isn’t a place for factory workers who want to just punch in and punch out every day, Mr. Kosel said: “If you want to be one of those people, you won’t be successful here.”

At a Caterpillar Inc. plant in Clayton, N.C., investments in technology help a single shift of workers produce the small-wheel loaders that four years ago would have taken two shifts.

The Harley-Davidson Inc. ’s engine plant in Milwaukee has robotic arms to ferry motorcycle pieces, taking over the tough, repetitive work formerly done by employees, said plant manager Chuck Statz. The machines have made the workplace safer, he said, mirroring a national trend. In 2018, factory workers were hurt at half the rate as in 2003.

Harley-Davidson employed 2,200 unionized manufacturing workers in 2018, 400 fewer than in 2014, which the company attributed to several factors. Caterpillar reported that it had 10,000 unionized workers at the end of 2018, down from 15,000 in 2007 During the same period, the equipment maker’s revenue climbed 20%.

A recent search of all Caterpillar’s U.S. job posts show that more than four in five require or prefer a college degree. A majority of the company’s production jobs called for a degree or specialized skill.

High risk
Ms. Muthana faced a hard choice in 2012: whether to invest millions of dollars in automated manufacturing and training, or to retire and close Pioneer, the company her uncle started 30 years ago.

In the old days, the factory’s oil-sputtering machines were adjusted by two dozen workers wielding foot-long wrenches. At the end of their shifts, they were covered in grease and metal shavings.

Pioneer’s biggest clients, makers of heating and cooling systems, switched to cheaper foreign suppliers. Business fell 90% in one year. And the company owed more to suppliers than its outstanding orders could cover.

Ms. Muthana sat in the company parking lot on October 15, 2012, looking at the cars of her employees. “If I closed my doors, where were they going to go?” she recalled thinking.

Rather than close the plant, she hired Pioneer’s first salespeople. They found vehicle makers that needed complex metal components that Pioneer could make more profitably than the parts for heaters and air conditioners.

The problem was that Pioneer’s old machinery couldn’t make the parts fast enough. So Ms. Muthana sought machines that could be programmed to precisely cut and drill the intricate parts in a single operation.

Labor Lag
U.S. manufacturers have shifted investmentfrom labor to capital more quickly than thebroader economy.

Pioneer had little experience with such advanced equipment, Ms. Muthana said, but she persuaded suppliers to help her install and set up the machines, as well as train employees to use them.

“We put a lot of money on her floor at one time with minimal guarantees that we were going to get that money back,” said Dave Polito, owner of her main machine supplier. Ms. Muthana said she has now spent more than $6 million on new technology, largely for machines and software.

The machines can make one complex part every six minutes, compared with 45 minutes of work on multiple machines once needed to produce a single part. Learning how wasn’t easy for longtime Pioneer employees.

Fernando Delatorre, who operated the older machines at Pioneer for 14 years, struggled to memorize the codes used to program the new machines.

“I wasn’t into computer things, learning all these numbers,” said Mr. Delatorre. He earned $16.50 an hour when he left Pioneer in 2017 for a construction job that paid more.

For Ms. Muthana, losing or firing longtime employees was the toughest part of her factory’s transition. About 10 of the company’s 40 workers remained. Just one of them operates a special grinder that hasn’t been computerized.

“I saved those jobs, and I gave them the opportunity,” she said, “but then most of the team is no longer here anyway.”

On a recent morning, Pioneer workers inspected parts that the automated equipment had made on their own overnight. They took digital measurements to make sure the parts matched customer specifications. A screen overhead detailed how efficiently each machine was operating.

A yellow light on one machine caught the eye of technician Stacy Czyzewski. A cutting tool was due to be replaced. She opened the machine’s enclosure, which seals in the oil and metal scraps. Using a small Allen wrench, she popped out the worn part and replaced it.

She punched codes on the machine’s keypad from memory and marked the repair on her iPad. Ms. Czyzewski wiped her hands on a towel. Her black polo shirt, emblazoned with Pioneer’s logo, was spotless.

Ms. Czyzewski had previously worked five years cleaning equipment at an Altria Group Inc. chewing tobacco plant. When it closed in 2017, a grant helped Ms. Czyzewski pay for a four-month training program where she learned to operate the machines used at Pioneer.

In a room at the center of the Pioneer factory, Rachith Thipperi converts customer orders into 3-D blueprints that are used to program machines. He started work at Pioneer as an intern while studying for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Thipperi saw a future in the modern American factory.

Rachith Thipperi, an engineer, creates 3-D blueprints to program machines that manufacture customer orders at Pioneer Service Inc.

“There are people who are stuck in old manufacturing,” he said, “but there is also this innovative and growth aspect of it.”

Production workers at Pioneer start at $14 an hour and rise to $27 an hour with experience. Before investing in modern machinery, worker pay started near minimum wage, which was $8.25 an hour around the time the company was transforming in 2010.

Inspirational inscriptions decorate the walls of the Pioneer factory. “The most dangerous words are we’ve always done it that way,” one said. The boss has lunch with her 40 employees each quarter. Half are women.

Ms. Muthana attends college career fairs to find workers with skills and a desire to learn. “I’m willing to give you the opportunities,” she said. “But if you’re not willing to change, and you’re not willing to get out of your comfort zone, there’s nothing I can do.”

Write to Austen Hufford at austen.hufford@wsj.com

October 2018:An exchange prompted by the essay 

The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class? 

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Bill Fletcher
Taking a long view of precariousness as an inherent feature of capitalism can shed light on the contemporary debate on “the precariat.” Read

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Nancy Folbre
The focus on “the precariat” is useful but limited: the fight over distribution isn’t just between labor and capital. Read

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Azfar Khan
A universal basic income is key to delivering security and autonomy to people in a precarious world. Read

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Alexandra Köves
Beyond policies like a universal basic income, a transition to a equitable and sustainable society requires the redefinition of well-being, needs, and work itself. Read

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George Liodakis
There is no “precariat,” per se—the working class as-a-whole remains the necessary agent for transformation. Read

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Ronaldo Munck
Work in the Global South has always been precarious, but the resurgence of global labor organizing offers a way forward. Read

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William I. Robinson
The “precariat,” rather than a new class, is part of the global proletariat, on whose struggle with transnational capital our fate depends. Read

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Pritam Singh
A basic income alone is not transformative, but a feature of a broader ecosocialist vision of dismantling capitalism. Read

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Eva-Maria Swidler
Workers in the Global North have a lot to learn from the past struggles of workers in the Global South (as well as in their own countries). Read

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Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor
Labor unions must continue to play an important role in the fight for economic justice and against precariousness. Read

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Author’s Response
Guy Standing addresses points raised by the contributors to this roundtable. Read
 

By Guy Standing

October 2018

David Harvey: ‘The Left Has to Rethink Its Theoretical and Tactical Apparatus.’

FROM ROAR MAGAZINE. David Harvey, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of our times, sits down with the activist collective AK Malabocas to discuss the transformations in the mode of capital accumulation, the centrality of the urban terrain in contemporary class struggles, and the implications of all this for anti-capitalist organizing.

AK Malabocas: In the last forty years, the mode of capital accumulation has changed globally. What do these changes mean for the struggle against capitalism?

David Harvey: From a macro-perspective, any mode of production tends to generate a very distinctive kind of opposition, which is a curious mirrored image of itself. If you look back to the 1960s or 1970s, when capital was organized in big corporatist, hierarchical forms, you had oppositional structures that were corporatist, unionist kinds of political apparatuses. In other words, a Fordist system generated a Fordist kind of opposition.

With the breakdown of this form of industrial organization, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, you ended up with a much more decentralized configuration of capital: more fluid over space and time than previously thought. At the same time we saw the emergence of an opposition that is about networking and decentralization and that doesn’t like hierarchy and the previous Fordist forms of opposition.

So, in a funny sort of way, the leftists reorganize themselves in the same way capital accumulation is reorganized. If we understand that the left is a mirror image of what we are criticizing, then maybe what we should do is to break the mirror and get out of this symbiotic relationship with what we are criticizing.

In the Fordist era, the factory was the main site of resistance. Where can we find it now that capital has moved away from the factory floor towards the urban terrain?

First of all, the factory-form has not disappeared—you still find factories in Bangladesh or in China. What is interesting is how the mode of production in the core cities changed. For example, the logistics sector has undergone a huge expansion: UPS, DHL and all of these delivery workers are producing enormous values nowadays.

In the last decades, a huge shift has occurred in the service sector as well: the biggest employers of labor in the 1970s in the US were General Motors, Ford and US Steel. The biggest employers of labor today are McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart. Back then, the factory was the center of the working class, but today we find the working class mainly in the service sector. And why would we say that producing cars is more important than producing hamburgers?

Unfortunately the left is not comfortable with the idea of organizing fast-food workers. Its picture of the classical working class doesn’t fit with value production of the service workers, the delivery workers, the restaurant workers, the supermarket workers.

The proletariat did not disappear, but there is a new proletariat which has very different characteristics from the traditional one the left used to identify as the vanguard of the working class. In this sense, the McDonalds workers became the steel workers of the twenty-first century

If this is what the new proletariat is about, where are the places to organize resistance now?

It’s very difficult to organize in the workplaces. For example, delivery drivers are moving all over the place. So this population could maybe be better organized outside the working place, meaning in their neighborhood structures.

There is already an interesting phrase in Gramsci’s work from 1919 saying that organizing in the workplace and having workplace councils is all well, but we should have neighborhood councils, too. And the neighborhood councils, he said, have a better understanding of what the conditions of the whole working class are compared to the sectoral understanding of workplace organizing.

Workplace organizers used to know very well what a steelworker was, but they didn’t understand what the proletariat was about as a whole. The neighborhood organization would then include for example the street cleaners, the house workers, the delivery drivers. Gramsci never really took this up and said: ‘come on, the Communist Party should organize neighborhood assemblies!’

Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions in the European context where Communist Parties did in fact organize neighborhood councils—because they couldn’t organize in the workplace, like in Spain for example. In the 1960s this was a very powerful form of organizing. Therefore—as I have argued for a very long time—we should look at the organization of neighborhoods as a form of class organization. Gramsci only mentioned it once in his writings and he never pursued it further.

In Britain in the 1980s, there were forms of organizing labor in city-wide platforms on the basis of trades councils, which were doing what Gramsci suggested. But within the union movement these trades councils were always regarded as inferior forms of organizing labor. They were never treated as being foundational to how the union movement should operate.

In fact, it turned out that the trades councils were often much more radical than the conventional trade unions and that was because they were rooted in the conditions of the whole working class, not only the often privileged sectors of the working-class. So, to the extent that they had a much broader definition of the working class, the trades councils tended to have much more radical politics. But this was never valorized by the trade union movement in general—it was always regarded as a space where the radicals could play.

The advantages of this form of organizing are obvious: it overcomes the split between sectoral organizing, it includes all kinds of “deterritorialized” labor, and it is very suitable to new forms of community and assembly-based organization, as Murray Bookchin was advocating, for example.

In the recent waves of protest—in Spain and Greece, for instance, or in the Occupy movement—you can find this idea of “localizing resistance.” It seems that these movements tend to organize around issues of everyday life, rather than the big ideological questions that the traditional left used to focus on.

Why would you say that organizing around everyday life is not one of the big questions? I think it is one of the big questions. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and everyday life in cities is what people are exposed to and have their difficulties in. These difficulties reside as much in the sphere of the realization of value as in the sphere of the production of value.

This is one of my very important theoretical arguments: everybody reads Volume I of Capital and nobody reads Volume II. Volume I is about the production of value, Volume II is about the realization of value. Focusing on Volume II, you clearly see that the conditions of realization are just as important as the conditions of production.

Marx often talks about the necessity of seeing capital as the contradictory unity between production and realization. Where value is produced and where it is realized are two different things. For example, a lot of value is produced in China and is actually realized by Apple or by Walmart in the United States. And, of course, the realization of value is about the realization of value by means of expensive working-class consumption.

Capital might concede higher wages at the point of production, but then it recuperates it at the point of realization by the fact that working people have to pay much higher rents and housing costs, telephone costs, credit card costs and so on. So class struggles over realization—over affordable housing, for example—are just as significant for the working class as struggles of wages and work conditions. What is the point of having a higher wage if it is immediately taken back in terms of higher housing costs?

In their relationship to the working class, capitalists long ago learned that they can make a lot of money out of taking back what they have given away. And, to the degree that—particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—workers became increasingly empowered in the sphere of consumption, capital starts to concentrate much more on pulling back value through consumption.

So the struggles in the sphere of realization, which where not that strong in Marx’s times, and the fact that nobody reads the damn book (Volume II), is a problem for the conventional left. When you say to me: ‘what is the macro-problem here?’—well, this is a macro-problem! The conception of capital and the relation between production and realization. If you don’t see the contradictory unity between both then you will not get the whole picture. Class struggle is written all over it and I can’t understand why a lot of Marxists can’t get their head around how important this is.

Harvey_FistMoneyThe problem is how we understand Marx in 2015. In Marx’s times, the extent of urbanization was relatively convenient and the consumerism of the working class was almost non-existent, so all Marx had to talk about was that the working class manages to survive on a meager wage and that they are very sophisticated in doing that. Capital left them to their own devices to do what they like.

But nowadays we are in a world where consumerism is responsible for about 30 percent of the dynamic of the global economy—in the US it’s even 70 percent. So why are we sitting here and saying consumerism is kind of irrelevant, sticking to Volume I and talking about production and not about consumerism?

What urbanization does is to force us into certain kinds of consumerism, for example: you have to have an automobile. So your lifestyle is dictated in lots of ways by the form urbanization takes. And again, in Marx’s days this wasn’t significant, but in our days this is crucial. We have to get around with forms of organizing that actually recognize this change in the dynamic of class struggle.

Given this shift, the left would definitely have to adjust its tactics and forms of organizing, as well as its conception of what to organize for.

The groups that stamped the recent movements with their character, coming from the anarchist and autonomist traditions, are much more embedded in the politics of everyday life, much more than the traditional Marxists.

I am very sympathetic to the anarchists, they have a much better line on this, precisely in dealing with the politics of consumption and their critique of what consumerism is about. Part of their objective is to change and reorganize everyday life around new and different principles. So I think this is a crucial point to which a lot of political action has to be directed these days. But I disagree with you in saying that this is no “big question.”

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100 percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states out of public control where this is the case. No question: the capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of what happened for example in 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona and then all over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and smashed the resistance.

That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be seized?

To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some different forms of organization.

There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and activities alone.

One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of organization that is very different to the one coming out of assembly-based politics.

From an anarchist perspective, I would say that it is possible to replace even supra-national institutions like the WHO with confederal organizations which are built from the bottom up and which eventually arrive at worldwide decision-making.

Maybe to a certain degree, but we have to be aware that there will always be some kind of hierarchies and we will always face problems like accountability or the right of recourse. There will be complicated relationships between, for example, people dealing with the problem of global warming from the standpoint of the world as a whole and from the standpoint of a group that is on the ground, let’s say in Hanover or somewhere, and that wonders: ‘why should we listen to what they are saying?’

So you believe this would require some form of authority?

No, there will be authority structures anyway—there will always be. I have never been in an anarchist meeting where there was no secret authority structure. There is always this fantasy of everything being horizontal, but I sit there and watch and think: ‘oh god, there is a whole hierarchical structure in here—but it’s covert.’

Coming back to the recent protests around the Mediterranean: many movements have focused on local struggles. What is the next step to take towards social transformation?

At some point we have to create organizations which are able to assemble and enforce social change on a broader scale. For example, will Podemos in Spain be able to do that? In a chaotic situation like the economic crisis of the last years, it is important for the left to act. If the left doesn’t make it, then the right-wing is the next option. I think—and I hate to say this—but I think the left has to be more pragmatic in relation to the dynamics going on right now.

More pragmatic in what sense?

Well, why did I support SYRIZA even though it is not a revolutionary party? Because it opened a space in which something different could happen and therefore it was a progressive move for me.

It is a bit like Marx saying: the first step to freedom is the limitation of the length of the working day. Very narrow demands open up space for much more revolutionary outcomes, and even when there isn’t any possibility for any revolutionary outcomes, we have to look for compromise solutions which nevertheless roll back the neoliberal austerity nonsense and open the space where new forms of organizing can take place.

For example, it would be interesting if Podemos looked towards organizing forms of democratic confederalism—because in some ways Podemos originated with lots of assembly-type meetings taking place all over Spain, so they are very experienced with the assembly structure.

The question is how they connect the assembly-form to some permanent forms of organization concerning their upcoming position as a strong party in Parliament. This also goes back to the question of consolidating power: you have to find ways to do so, because without it the bourgeoisie and corporate capitalism are going to find ways to reassert it and take the power back.

What do you think about the dilemma of solidarity networks filling the void after the retreat of the welfare state and indirectly becoming a partner of neoliberalism in this way?

There are two ways of organizing. One is a vast growth of the NGO sector, but a lot of that is externally funded, not grassroots, and doesn’t tackle the question of the big donors who set the agenda—which won’t be a radical agenda. Here we touch upon the privatization of the welfare state.

This seems to me to be very different politically from grassroots organizations where people are on their own, saying: ‘OK, the state doesn’t take care of anything, so we are going to have to take care of it by ourselves.’ That seems to me to be leading to forms of grassroots organization with a very different political status.

But how to avoid filling that gap by helping, for example, unemployed people not to get squeezed out by neoliberal state?

Well there has to be an anti-capitalist agenda, so that when the group works with people everybody knows that it is not only about helping them to cope but that there is an organized intent to politically change the system in its entirety. This means having a very clear political project, which is problematic with decentralized, non-homogenous types of movements where somebody works one way, others work differently and there is no collective or common project.

This connects to the very first question you raised: there is no coordination of what the political objectives are. And the danger is that you just help people cope and there will be no politics coming out of it. For example, Occupy Sandy helped people get back to their houses and they did terrific work, but in the end they did what the Red Cross and federal emergency services should have done.

The end of history seems to have passed already. Looking at the actual conditions and concrete examples of anti-capitalist struggle, do you think “winning” is still an option?

Definitely, and moreover, you have occupied factories in Greece, solidarity economies across production chains being forged, radical democratic institutions in Spain and many beautiful things happening in many other places. There is a healthy growth of recognition that we need to be much broader concerning politics among all these initiatives.

The Marxist left tends to be a little bit dismissive of some of this stuff and I think they are wrong. But at the same time I don’t think that any of this is big enough on its own to actually deal with the fundamental structures of power that need to be challenged. Here we talk about nothing less than a state. So the left will have to rethink its theoretical and tactical apparatus.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His most recent book is Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile, 2014).

Students in Milan took to the streets to protest against Italian austerity, October, 4 2013. (Photo via Shutterstock)

Reality always has this power to surprise. It surprises you with an answer that it gives to questions never asked – and which are most tempting. A great stimulus to life is there, in the capacity to divine possible unasked questions.

— Eduardo Galeano

By Henry Giroux

Truthout, July 2, 2014

Neoliberalism’s Assault on Democracy

Fred Jameson has argued that “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (Jameson 2003).

One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is that within the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized, there are new waves of resistance, especially among young people, who are insisting that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage, and that if it does not come to an end, what we will experience, in all probability, is the destruction of human life and the planet itself.

Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian possibility. [1]

As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital (Giroux 2008; 2014). As a political project, it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws” (Yates 2013). As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.

Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. As the democratic public spheres of civil society have atrophied under the onslaught of neoliberal regimes of austerity, the social contract has been either greatly weakened or replaced by savage forms of casino capitalism, a culture of fear, and the increasing use of state violence. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society — now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. That they are unable to make their voices heard and lack any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which young people and others are suffering under a democratic deficit, producing what Chantal Mouffe calls “a profound dissatisfaction with a number of existing societies” under the reign of neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe 2013:119). This is one reason why so many youth, along with workers, the unemployed, and students, have been taking to the streets in Greece, Mexico, Egypt, the United States, and England.

The Rise of Disposable Youth

What is particularly distinctive about the current historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth across the globe, have been increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social order and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how a number of countries across the globe define their future.

The plight of youth as disposable populations is evident in the fact that millions of them in countries such as England, Greece, and the United States have been unemployed and denied long term benefits. The unemployment rate for young people in many countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece hovers between 40 and 50 per cent. To make matters worse, those with college degrees either cannot find work or are working at low-skill jobs that pay paltry wages. In the United States, young adjunct faculty constitute one of the fastest growing populations on food stamps. Suffering under huge debts, a jobs crisis, state violence, a growing surveillance state, and the prospect that they would inherit a standard of living far below that enjoyed by their parents, many young people have exhibited a rage that seems to deepen their resignation, despair, and withdrawal from the political arena.

This is the first generation, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.” (Bauman 2012a; 2012b; 2012c) He rightly insists that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent” (Bauman 2004:76). Youth no longer occupy the hope of a privileged place that was offered to previous generations. They now inhabit a neoliberal notion of temporality marked by a loss of faith in progress along with the emergence of apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak, and insecure. Heightened expectations and progressive visions pale and are smashed next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that wipe out pensions, eliminate quality health care, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness, while giving millions to banks and the military. Students, in particular, found themselves in a world in which unrealized aspirations have been replaced by dashed hopes and a world of onerous debt (Fraser 2013; On the history of debt, see Graeber 2012).

The Revival of the Radical Imagination

Within the various regimes of neoliberalism that have emerged particularly in North since the late 1970s, the ethical grammars that drew attention to the violence and suffering withered or, as in the United States, seemed to disappear altogether, while dispossessed youth continued to lose their dignity, bodies, and material goods to the machineries of disposability. The fear of losing everything, the horror of an engulfing and crippling precarity, the quest to merely survive, the rise of the punishing state and police violence, along with the impending reality of social and civil death, became a way of life for the 99 percent in the United States and other countries. Under such circumstances, youth were no longer the place where society reveals its dreams, but increasingly hid its nightmares. Against the ravaging policies of austerity and disposability, “zones of abandonment appeared in which the domestic machinery of violence, suffering, cruelty, and punishment replaced the values of compassion, social responsibility, and civic courage” (Biehl 2005:2).

In opposition to such conditions, a belief in the power of collective resistance and politics emerged once again in 2010, as global youth protests embraced the possibility of deepening and expanding democracy, rather than rejecting it. Such movements produced a new understanding of politics based on horizontal forms of collaboration and political participation. In doing so, they resurrected revitalized and much needed questions about class power, inequality, financial corruption, and the shredding of the democratic process. They also explored as well as what it meant to create new communities of mutual support, democratic modes of exchange and governance, and public spheres in which critical dialogue and exchanges could take place (For an excellent analysis on neoliberal-induced financial corruption, see Anderson 2004).

A wave of youth protests starting in 2010 in Tunisia, and spreading across the globe to the United States and Europe, eventually posed a direct challenge to neoliberal modes of domination and the corruption of politics, if not democracy itself (Hardt & Negri 2012). The legitimating, debilitating, and depoliticizing notion that politics could only be challenged within established methods of reform and existing relations of power was rejected outright by students and other young people across the globe. For a couple of years, young people transformed basic assumptions about what politics is and how the radical imagination could be mobilized to challenge the basic beliefs of neoliberalism and other modes of authoritarianism. They also challenged dominant discourses ranging from deficit reduction and taxing the poor to important issues that included poverty, joblessness, the growing unmanageable levels of student debt, and the massive spread of corporate corruption. As Jonathan Schell argued, youth across the globe were enormously successfully in unleashing “a new spirit of action”, an expression of outrage fueled less by policy demands than by a cry of collective moral and political indignation whose message was

‘Enough!’ to a corrupt political, economic and media establishment that hijacked the world’s wealth for itself… sabotaging the rule of law, waging interminable savage and futile wars, plundering the world’s finite resources, and lying about all this to the public [while] threatening Earth’s life forms into the bargain. (Schell 2011)

Yet, some theorists have recently argued that little has changed since 2011, in spite of this expression of collective rage and accompanying demonstrations by youth groups across the globe.

The Collapse or Reconfiguration of Youthful Protests?

Costas Lapavitsas and Alex Politaki, writing in The Guardian, argue that as the “economic and social disaster unfolded in 2012 and 2013”, youth in Greece, France, Portugal, and Spain have largely been absent from “politics, social movements and even from the spontaneous social networks that have dealt with the worst of the catastrophe” (Lapavitsas & Politaki 2014). Yet, at the same time, they insist that more and more young people have been “attracted to nihilistic ends of the political spectrum, including varieties of anarchism and fascism” (Lapavitsas & Politaki 2014). This indicates that young people have hardly been absent from politics. On the contrary, those youth moving to the right are being mobilized around needs that simply promise the swindle of fulfillment. This does not suggest youth are becoming invisible. On the contrary, the move on the part of students and others to the right implies that the economic crisis has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, one that would propel young people towards left political parties or social formations that effectively articulate a critical understanding of the present economic and political crisis.  Missing here is also a strategy to create and sustain a radical democratic political movement that avoids cooptation of the prevailing economic and political systems of oppression now dominating the United States, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, France, and England, among other countries.

This critique of youthful protesters as a suspect generation is repeated in greater detail by Andrew R. Myers in Student Pulse (Myers 2012). He argues that deteriorating economic and educational conditions for youth all over Europe have created not only a profound sense of political pessimism among young people, but also a dangerous, if not cynical, distrust towards established politics. Regrettably, Myers seems less concerned about the conditions that have written young people out of jobs, a decent education, imposed a massive debt on them, and offers up a future of despair and dashed hopes than the alleged unfortunate willingness of young people to turn their back on traditional parties. Myers argues rightly that globalization is the enemy of young people and is undermining democracy, but he wrongly insists that traditional social democratic parties are the only vehicles and hope left for real reform. As such, Myers argues that youth who exhibit distrust towards established governments and call for the construction of another world symbolize political defeat, if not cynicism itself. Unfortunately, with his lament about how little youth are protesting today and about their lack of engagement in the traditional forms of politics, he endorses, in the end, a defense of those left/liberal parties that embrace social democracy and the new labor policies of centrist-left coalitions. His rebuke borders on bad faith, given his criticism of young people for not engaging in electoral politics and joining with unions, both of which, for many youth, rightfully represent elements of a reformist politics they reject.

It is ironic that both of these critiques of the alleged passivity of youth and the failure of their politics have nothing to say about the generations of adults that failed these young people — that is, what disappears in these narratives is the fact that an older generation accepted the “realization that one generation no longer holds out a hand to the next” (Knott 2011:ix). What is lacking here is any critical sense regarding the historical conditions and dismal lack of political and moral responsibility of an adult generation who shamefully bought into and reproduced, at least since the 1970s, governments and social orders wedded to war, greed, political corruption, xenophobia, and willing acceptance of the dictates of a ruthless form of neoliberal globalization.

In fact, what was distinctive about the protesting youth across the globe was their rejection to the injustices of neoliberalism and their attempts to redefine the meaning of politics and democracy, while fashioning new forms of revolt (Hardt & Negri 2012; Graeber 2013). Among their many criticisms, youthful protesters argued vehemently that traditional social democratic, left, and liberal parties suffered from an “extremism of the center” that made them complicitous with the corporate and ruling political elites, resulting in their embrace of the inequities of a form of casino capitalism which assumed that the market should govern the entirety of social life, not just the economic realm (Hardt & Negri 2012:88).

Resurrecting the Radical Imagination

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that what united the Occupy Movement in the US with other movements globally was their emphasis on direct action and their rejection of modernist structures of representation and politics, including support for elections and traditional political parties, which they considered corrupt. As such, they did not reject the project of democracy, but asked where it had gone and how they could “engage with it again” and win back “the political power of the citizen worker” (Hardt & Negri 2012:29). Commenting on the radical nature of such youth protests, David Graeber argues that the potential of the new youth movements, if not their threat to both conservatives and liberals alike, is that they were more “willing to embrace positions more radical than anything seen, on a mass scale” in a number of countries, particularly “their explicit appeal to class politics, a complete reconstruction of the existing political system, [and] a call (for many at least) not just to reform capitalism but to begin dismantling it entirely” (Graeber 2013:69-70).

What recent critics of the current state of  youth protests miss is that the real issue is not whether the occupy movements throughout Europe and the US have petered out, but rather, what have we learned from them, how have they been transformed, and what are we going to do about it? More specifically, what can be done to revitalize these rebellions into an international movement capable of effecting real change? Rather than claiming that youth have failed protesting the politics of austerity, neoliberal economies of stagnation, and the corrupt rule of finance capital, it is more important to recognize the ways in which such actions are undermined by the continued struggle for survival, and the threat and reality of state violence. The great “crime” of the youthful protesters is that they have embraced the utopian notion that there is an alternative to capitalism and, in doing so, are fighting back against a systemic war on the radical imagination, the belief that everything is for consumption, and that the only value that matters is exchange value.

The protesters in various countries have not failed. On the contrary, they realize that they need more time to fully develop the visions, strategies, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures, organizations, and alliances necessary to more fully realize their attempts to replace the older, corrupt social orders with new ones that are not simply democratic, but have the support of the people who inhabit them. Rather than disappearing, many protesters have focused on more specific struggles, such as getting universities to disinvest in coal industries, fighting the rise of student debt, organizing against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, protesting austerity cuts, creating free social services for the poor and excluded, and developing educational spaces that can provide the formative culture necessary for creating the needs, identities, and modes of agency capable of democratic relations (Zeese 2013; Taaffe 2013; Brahinsky 2014). At the same time, they are participating in everyday struggles that, as Thomas Piketty points out in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, make clear that free-market capitalism is not only responsible for “terrifying” inequalities in both wealth and income, but also produces anti-democratic oligarchies (Piketty 2014:571). And it is precisely through various attempts to create spaces in which democratic culture can be cultivated that the radical imagination can be liberated from the machinery of social and political death produced by casino capitalism. What was once considered impossible becomes possible through the development of worldwide youth protests that speak to a future that is being imagined, but waiting to be brought to fruition.

Challenges for Dark Times

New rights, demands, visions, and modes of political representation dedicated to the public and social good need time and involve long-term commitments to develop. How the construction of alternative forms of power, strategies, and organization will be developed that can both challenge established powers and become more fully realized is not clear. Needless to say, while youth movements around the globe have and are providing what Hardt and Negri call “a scaffolding” in preparation for an unforeseen event that would provide the ground  for a radical social break out of which a new society can be built, there is much to be done in preparation for such an event (Hardt & Negri:103). The challenge young protesters face centers on developing visions, tactics, and strong organizations that enable strategies for change that become more than ephemeral protests reduced to “signs without organization”, incapable of making a real difference (Aronowitz 2014).

Youth in various countries need to cultivate a radical imagination capable of providing alternatives to capitalism that will offer a challenge not only to neoliberalism and its destructive austerity policies, but also a vision that speaks to people’s needs for a radical democracy, one that is capable of convincing diverse elements of a broader public that change is possible, and that existing systems of globalization and casino capitalism can be overcome. While the crisis of financial capital, among other dominant modes of oppression, must be challenged, there is also the urgent need for youth protesters to articulate “the broader dimensions of alienation beyond income disparity” (Aronowitz 2011). Issues of existential despair, meaninglessness, hopelessness, and a retreat into the orbits of privatization must be addressed if subjectivities and modes of agency are to be mobilized, capable of engaging in the long struggle for a radical democracy. Moreover, as long as these protest groups are fragmented, no significant change will take place. Planning effective strategies and building sustainable organizations will not work as long as there are divisions around authority, race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity. When these divisions function so as to democratize all demands and fail to provide some of democratic leadership, politics dissolves into a jumble of competing discourses and power becomes pathologized. As Sarah Jaffe points out,

The paradox of Occupy is that many of the things that made it succeed also made it splinter. The attraction to a “leaderless” movement was palpable, and the lack of demands made it possible for anyone to join in as long as they agreed with the basic premise that a tiny elite has too much power. Yet the idea of leaderlessness, as so many have written, masks the ways power continues to operate, and the lack of demands wound up as a refusal, oftentimes, to deal at all with existing systems. (Jaffe 2014)

Alliances among different groups, especially with workers and labor unions, must take place across national boundaries, motivated by a comprehensive understanding of global politics and its mechanics of power, ideology, corporate sovereignty, and its devastating effects on people’s lives, and the reality and ideal of a radical democracy and more just world. The possibility for such alliances, unity, and comprehensive understanding of politics among the youth of the world is greater than ever before, given the new technologies and the growing consciousness that power is now global and has generated a need for new modes of politics (Epstein 2014:41-44; Aronowitz 2014a; Aronowitz 2014b). It is time for authentic rage to transform itself into an international movement for the creation of a genuinely democratic formative culture and an effective strategy for social, political, and economic change.

Notes:

[1] See, for instance, the 5th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See also, the Obama Administration’s publication of the third US National Climate Assessment, which provides a comprehensive and dire scientific assessment of generated of climate change, focusing on its effects on the US economy, as well as on various regions across the United States.

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Aronowitz, S., 2014a, ‘What Kind of Left Does America Need?’, Tikkun, 14 April, from http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/what-kind-of-left-does-america-need.

Aronowitz, S., 2014b, ‘Where is the outrage?’, Situations, V(2), from http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/view/1488/1524.

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Bauman, Z., 2012c, This is not a diary, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

Biehl, J., 2005, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Epstein, B., 2014, ‘Prospects for a resurgence of the US left’, Tikkun, 29 (2).

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Graeber, D., 2013, The democracy project: a history, a crisis, a movement, The Random House Publishing Group, New York, NY.

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Zeese, K., 2013, ‘TPP protesters drop banner from trade building to bring attention to secretive deal’, The Real News, 2 October, from https://www.theinnoplex.com/news/newssub/tpp-protestors-scale-trade-building-to-bring-attention-to-secretive-deal.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books include: Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013), America’s Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), and The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights, 2014). The Toronto Star named Henry Giroux one of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think! Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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Henry A. Giroux | Disposable Life

Robin Small

Karl Marx: The Revolutionary as Educator

Springer, New York, 2013. 85pp., £44.99

Reviewed by Patrick Ainley

This book meets a need illustrated by a recent poster advertising a meeting for students at the London University Institute of Education that asked ‘Who was Karl Marx?’

Such is the repetitive diet of Foucauldianism, augmented by the latest academic fashion for Deleuze and Guattari, that even postgraduate students of education are unaware that Marx was, as this book begins by asserting, ‘an important educational thinker’.

Although Marx wrote before the modern state school system was established, Small states ‘He is the greatest theorist of the society that gave rise to schools as we know them – and this is the society we still live in’ (1). As he adds, Marx wrote for people who needed to find out what was wrong with the society they lived in, and how to change it for the better, and so he was also an educator. More importantly, ‘Marx is an educator for us. He challenges us to develop our capacity to think critically about our own society’ (2). This is the seminal Marx presented in this book.

Robin Small, a philosopher of education at Auckland University who has previously written Marx and Education (Ashgate, 2005), is well qualified to introduce new readers to Marx’s revolutionary education in the concise form intended by Springer’s series on ‘Key Thinkers in Education’, edited by Paul Gibbs, in which each chapter is separately downloadable, although the overall price – in virtual form or hard covers – is exorbitant. Hopefully, however, the book will make its way into libraries, because it is an introduction to Marx’s life as well as to his thought. So Small begins with Marx’s own education at the Trier Gymnasium, quoting Marx’s prize-winning essay `Thoughts of a Youth on Choosing a Vocation’, which insists ‘worth can be assured only by a profession in which we are not servile tools, but in which we act independently in our own sphere’ (5). Then, in Bonn and Berlin Universities, Small introduces the ideas of Bauer, Feuerbach and Stirner, which influenced Dr Marx before ‘the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy’ (quoted 9) in the form of ‘Marx as Journalist’.

Small details particularly Marx’s debate with Stirner, who ‘wrote on education from a teacher’s standpoint’ (21), and with Feuerbach, taking ‘education’ in the third ‘thesis’ on Feuerbach ‘in a wide sense, to include all the influences that determine human development’ (19), like enculturation in the German term Bildung. Here ‘Marx is emphasizing a critical thinking which is also self-critical’ (24). Then in his first works with Engels, Marx breaks with Bauer to found ‘the theory later known as “historical materialism” [which] centres on a distinction between the “base” and “superstructure”’ (25), with education a part of the superstructure. ‘This is the basis on which Marx is able to advance proposals for school reform. He can acknowledge the limits to what can be achieved within a capitalist society, yet still look for opportunities for an education that runs ahead of the present state of things’ (27).

Thus in The Communist Manifesto Marx proposes ‘Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.’ What Marx meant by this in relation to the debate over factory schools and over state education as well as the curriculum, Small traces in Marx’s contributions to the educational programme of the First International. Here he ‘emphasized the need for working within the existing social order, while at the same time arguing against … education by the state’, and for ‘a system of state regulation without “interference”’, ‘citing as an example the decentralized public school system of Massachusetts’ (57). Marx and Engels were also impressed by the educational reforms of the Paris Commune, which ‘confirmed that a socialist revolution could not simply take over existing state power but would have to set up an entirely new apparatus of government’ (58). So, they advocated a polytechnic curriculum, which ‘imparts the general principles of all processes of production’, like Corbon’s enseignement professionel, which ‘rethought the idea of technical education’ to take advantage of the positive side of flexibility, so that workers can move from one branch of industry as desired, rather than spending their lives in ‘life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation’ (66).

Meanwhile, Marx’s daughters enrolled in a relatively conventional academic schooling at the South Hampstead College for Ladies, where their father was rather proud of their achievements, but complained repeatedly about the fees! ‘None of this’, Small comments, ‘would have suited Eleanor Marx particularly’, as she was ‘the most like her father in personality – energetic and independent, with a strong rebellious spirit’ (53).

Having seen how Marx responded to the educational issues of his time, Small asks what we can learn from him now that education has become the principal legitimator of social inequality, and a prime means of social control over prolonged youth. ‘Simply repeating what he says … will not be enough … we have to bring our own thinking to the task’ (70). Small focuses on two central topics: the school in today’s society, and the teaching force. (It is a pity he does not extend this discussion to further and higher education, as the age of education has extended to schoolify these institutions.) ‘To rescue education from the influence of the ruling class’, as The Communist Manifesto urges, Marx resists restricting the curriculum to subjects supposedly protected from ideological influences; rather he sees the need to counteract them, together with tradition and habit. These are all instances of ideology, but ‘not simply deceptions imposed on some passive audience. They are grounded in experience and this is the source of their strength and persistence’ (73). ‘Marx located education within “practical social relations” rather than with art, religion and philosophy in the higher regions of the social “superstructure”.’ Education is thus in dynamic interaction with the economic base. As he puts it, ‘education produces labour capacity’, just as health care maintains or restores the ability to work, so that, as Small comments, ‘While the school may be a location where ideology is passed on, that is not its main function’. This avoids ‘the simplistic view that public education in capitalist society is an elaborate conspiracy to spread false beliefs’ (74).

At the present time, that of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information society’, specialised expertise is crucial to the creation of new wealth, as well as itself being a commodity. As Small points out, ‘In one draft for Capital, Marx speaks of the “general intellect” or “social mind” – that is, the sum of society’s scientific understanding and expertise – as being a means of production in its own right … As Marx puts it, the general progress and accumulation of society’s knowledge “is appropriated gratis by capital”’ (74); ‘At this point, invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science’ (75). Institutionalised education is bound up with this development, but Marx adds that education distributes knowledge unequally to different classes, as it perverts what ought to be a public good into private knowledge. The modern state has turned public education into a quasi-market, which is ‘free’ only within narrow boundaries, so that promises of equal opportunities and access for all cannot be realised.

This process of marketisation entails what Small calls a ‘redefinition of the “ideological castes”’ (79). This is being imposed in a different historical context from that in which a rising bourgeoisie sought to establish its power, giving rise to Adam Smith’s distinction between unproductive labour, associated with older forms of production for use, and productive labour realised in the instance of the schoolmaster ‘belabouring the heads of his scholars’, because the proprietor has invested his capital in a teaching factory instead of a sausage one. Small comments:

The labour of teachers appears as an overhead expense. That is, it is necessary to keep the whole system going, but not identifiable as adding value directly to commodities … The issue is not just about keeping costs (which here means wages) down. It is about what kind of work teachers are doing – and what kind of work they understand themselves as doing. (80)

Small approaches this is by asking, in conclusion, whether teaching is a professional occupation.

The Manifesto rejoices that ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers’. And Small comments, ‘For teachers the employer may be the state rather than a private school owner, but the same conditions of work apply’ (82), before cautioning that ‘this is not the last word’, because Marx and Engels add, ‘Bourgeois society reproduces in its own form everything against which it had fought in feudal or absolutist form’. So we need to ask, are the ancient vocations – ‘the free professions’, as they are called in German – of doctor, lawyer and priest, being reproduced in a new form, so that the professional model is extended in this new form to new occupational roles? As well as ‘general intellect’, there is what Marx calls ‘general industriousness’ (looking and being busy, like Dickens’s Mr Panks), which the culture of professionalism values, along with a sense of personal responsibility. ‘In Marxian language’, Small comments, ‘this looks like a typical ideological mindset that not only presents a false picture of social reality but also acts to the disadvantage of those who adopt it’ (83).

The de-professionalisation of teaching, along with other professional occupations, as they intermingle in inter-professional working with standardised and simplified para-professions, is analogous to the de-skilling inflicted on industrial craft workers in the 1970s and ’80s. It involves also a loss of autonomous judgement and control over what was an example of what Marx called ‘free activity’, like the often-cited case of artistic expression, but more directly social, with collegiality as its form of solidarity, ‘even if professions tend at the same time to be quite hierarchical in terms of specialized expertise’ (85). It may be, therefore, that these forms of solidarity can be defended and extended rather than abandoned – as suggested by Magali Sarfatti Larson in the conclusion to her 1977 Marxist analysis of The Rise of Professionalism. Like general schooling, leading to graduation as citizen and worker ‘fit for a variety of labours’, re-vocationalised higher education, in which students have a sense of induction to practise in a field of real application – including the academic profession – might be the means for professional workers, in solidarity with other workers, to find ways of claiming and realising the full human potential of all work. ‘But perhaps’, concludes Small, ‘this is where Marx’s assistance runs out and we have to make our own decisions’ (85).

1 March 2014

About the reviewer

Patrick Ainley

Patrick Ainley is author with Martin Allen of Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education (London: Continuum 2010). They blog at at radicaled.wordpress.com

Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change

The Economist, Jan 18th 2014

IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers.

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

For the most part, they did not. Nowadays, the majority of economists confidently wave such worries away. By raising productivity, they argue, any automation which economises on the use of labour will increase incomes. That will generate demand for new products and services, which will in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. To think otherwise has meant being tarred a Luddite—the name taken by 19th-century textile workers who smashed the machines taking their jobs.

For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.

When the sleeper wakes

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world’s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labour has fallen.

At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden, inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others.

Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978, and although some of that is due to the effects of ageing, some is not. In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.

This is one indication, Mr Summers says, that technical change is increasingly taking the form of “capital that effectively substitutes for labour”. There may be a lot more for such capital to do in the near future. A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.

Answering the question of whether such automation could lead to prolonged pain for workers means taking a close look at past experience, theory and technological trends. The picture suggested by this evidence is a complex one. It is also more worrying than many economists and politicians have been prepared to admit.

The lathe of heaven

Economists take the relationship between innovation and higher living standards for granted in part because they believe history justifies such a view. Industrialisation clearly led to enormous rises in incomes and living standards over the long run. Yet the road to riches was rockier than is often appreciated.

In 1500 an estimated 75% of the British labour force toiled in agriculture. By 1800 that figure had fallen to 35%. When the shift to manufacturing got under way during the 18th century it was overwhelmingly done at small scale, either within the home or in a small workshop; employment in a large factory was a rarity. By the end of the 19th century huge plants in massive industrial cities were the norm. The great shift was made possible by automation and steam engines.

Industrial firms combined human labour with big, expensive capital equipment. To maximise the output of that costly machinery, factory owners reorganised the processes of production. Workers were given one or a few repetitive tasks, often making components of finished products rather than whole pieces. Bosses imposed a tight schedule and strict worker discipline to keep up the productive pace. The Industrial Revolution was not simply a matter of replacing muscle with steam; it was a matter of reshaping jobs themselves into the sort of precisely defined components that steam-driven machinery needed—cogs in a factory system.

The way old jobs were done changed; new jobs were created. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University in Illinois, argues that the more intricate machines, techniques and supply chains of the period all required careful tending. The workers who provided that care were well rewarded. As research by Lawrence Katz, of Harvard University, and Robert Margo, of Boston University, shows, employment in manufacturing “hollowed out”. As employment grew for highly skilled workers and unskilled workers, craft workers lost out. This was the loss to which the Luddites, understandably if not effectively, took exception.

With the low-skilled workers far more numerous, at least to begin with, the lot of the average worker during the early part of this great industrial and social upheaval was not a happy one. As Mr Mokyr notes, “life did not improve all that much between 1750 and 1850.” For 60 years, from 1770 to 1830, growth in British wages, adjusted for inflation, was imperceptible because productivity growth was restricted to a few industries. Not until the late 19th century, when the gains had spread across the whole economy, did wages at last perform in line with productivity (see chart 1).

Along with social reforms and new political movements that gave voice to the workers, this faster wage growth helped spread the benefits of industrialisation across wider segments of the population. New investments in education provided a supply of workers for the more skilled jobs that were by then being created in ever greater numbers. This shift continued into the 20th century as post-secondary education became increasingly common.

Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University, and Mr Katz have written that workers were in a “race between education and technology” during this period, and for the most part they won. Even so, it was not until the “golden age” after the second world war that workers in the rich world secured real prosperity, and a large, property-owning middle class came to dominate politics. At the same time communism, a legacy of industrialisation’s harsh early era, kept hundreds of millions of people around the world in poverty, and the effects of the imperialism driven by European industrialisation continued to be felt by billions.

The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.

Take computers. In the early 20th century a “computer” was a worker, or a room of workers, doing mathematical calculations by hand, often with the end point of one person’s work the starting point for the next. The development of mechanical and electronic computing rendered these arrangements obsolete. But in time it greatly increased the productivity of those who used the new computers in their work.

Many other technical innovations had similar effects. New machinery displaced handicraft producers across numerous industries, from textiles to metalworking. At the same time it enabled vastly more output per person than craft producers could ever manage.

Player piano

For a task to be replaced by a machine, it helps a great deal if, like the work of human computers, it is already highly routine. Hence the demise of production-line jobs and some sorts of book-keeping, lost to the robot and the spreadsheet. Meanwhile work less easily broken down into a series of stereotyped tasks—whether rewarding, as the management of other workers and the teaching of toddlers can be, or more of a grind, like tidying and cleaning messy work places—has grown as a share of total employment.

But the “race” aspect of technological change means that such workers cannot rest on their pay packets. Firms are constantly experimenting with new technologies and production processes. Experimentation with different techniques and business models requires flexibility, which is one critical advantage of a human worker. Yet over time, as best practices are worked out and then codified, it becomes easier to break production down into routine components, then automate those components as technology allows.

If, that is, automation makes sense. As David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out in a 2013 paper, the mere fact that a job can be automated does not mean that it will be; relative costs also matter. When Nissan produces cars in Japan, he notes, it relies heavily on robots. At plants in India, by contrast, the firm relies more heavily on cheap local labour.

Even when machine capabilities are rapidly improving, it can make sense instead to seek out ever cheaper supplies of increasingly skilled labour. Thus since the 1980s (a time when, in America, the trend towards post-secondary education levelled off) workers there and elsewhere have found themselves facing increased competition from both machines and cheap emerging-market workers.

Such processes have steadily and relentlessly squeezed labour out of the manufacturing sector in most rich economies. The share of American employment in manufacturing has declined sharply since the 1950s, from almost 30% to less than 10%. At the same time, jobs in services soared, from less than 50% of employment to almost 70% (see chart 2). It was inevitable, therefore, that firms would start to apply the same experimentation and reorganisation to service industries.

A new wave of technological progress may dramatically accelerate this automation of brain-work. Evidence is mounting that rapid technological progress, which accounted for the long era of rapid productivity growth from the 19th century to the 1970s, is back. The sort of advances that allow people to put in their pocket a computer that is not only more powerful than any in the world 20 years ago, but also has far better software and far greater access to useful data, as well as to other people and machines, have implications for all sorts of work.

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free no one doubts such mastery is possible, though the speed at which fully self-driving cars will come to market remains hard to guess.

Brave new world

Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.

The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.

Jobs that are not easily automated may still be transformed. New data-processing technology could break “cognitive” jobs down into smaller and smaller tasks. As well as opening the way to eventual automation this could reduce the satisfaction from such work, just as the satisfaction of making things was reduced by deskilling and interchangeable parts in the 19th century. If such jobs persist, they may engage Mr Graeber’s “bullshit” detector.

Being newly able to do brain work will not stop computers from doing ever more formerly manual labour; it will make them better at it. The designers of the latest generation of industrial robots talk about their creations as helping workers rather than replacing them; but there is little doubt that the technology will be able to do a bit of both—probably more than a bit. A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?

There will still be jobs. Even Mr Frey and Mr Osborne, whose research speaks of 47% of job categories being open to automation within two decades, accept that some jobs—especially those currently associated with high levels of education and high wages—will survive (see table). Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.

And although Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee rightly point out that developing the business models which make the best use of new technologies will involve trial and error and human flexibility, it is also the case that the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.

In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.

The potential for dramatic change is clear. A future of widespread technological unemployment is harder for many to accept. Every great period of innovation has produced its share of labour-market doomsayers, but technological progress has never previously failed to generate new employment opportunities.

The productivity gains from future automation will be real, even if they mostly accrue to the owners of the machines. Some will be spent on goods and services—golf instructors, household help and so on—and most of the rest invested in firms that are seeking to expand and presumably hire more labour. Though inequality could soar in such a world, unemployment would not necessarily spike. The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3).

These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.

Such emotional and relational work could be as critical to the future as metal-bashing was in the past, even if it gets little respect at first. Cultural norms change slowly. Manufacturing jobs are still often treated as “better”—in some vague, non-pecuniary way—than paper-pushing is. To some 18th-century observers, working in the fields was inherently more noble than making gewgaws.

But though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price, were it not that no televisions that poor are still made. However, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up. If people lived on widgets alone— goods whose costs have fallen because of both globalisation and technology—there would have been no pause in the increase of real wages. It is the increase in the prices of stuff that isn’t mechanised (whose supply is often under the control of the state and perhaps subject to fundamental scarcity) that means a pay packet goes no further than it used to.

So technological progress squeezes some incomes in the short term before making everyone richer in the long term, and can drive up the costs of some things even more than it eventually increases earnings. As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.

The machine stops

Even if the long-term outlook is rosy, with the potential for greater wealth and lots of new jobs, it does not mean that policymakers should simply sit on their hands in the mean time. Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.

Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.

Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the “reservation wage”—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour.

Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.

From the print edition: Briefing

The economics of immiseration would be impossible without the politics of seduction, and capitalism’s appeal to our unconscious will to power and domination is not easily countered.

"The domain of seduction is the sacred horizon of appearances."
Jean Baudrillard, On Seduction

" ‘[I]mmiseration’ concerns not just the wages workers’ receive, but how long and how hard they have to work in order to get them."
Frances Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography

"[C]apitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

By Joseph Natoli

Truthout Cultural Analysis

March 31, 2014 – The genius of the internal combustion engine engineered by Etienne Lenoir in 1860 was to release the pressure of such combustion to pistons, rotation and movement. Explosion was controlled and detoured; ignition could be repeated and catastrophe avoided each time. Rising pressure and calibrated release equals relief. Psychology responds to this analogy, as does politics. Increased pressure on low-wage workers makes headlines: "The Walls Close In: Low Wage Workers Finding It’s Easier to Fall into Poverty, and Harder to Get Out." But all wage earners, underclass or middle class, are feeling the pressure. Thom Hartmann reports, "wages have gone down almost seven percent since the recession. And, that decline followed more than three decades of stagnant wages thanks to Reaganomics."

Mutual sharing and aid has no seductive power in our elemental level of being – but domination does.

Neoliberals, moderate or immoderate, pragmatic or crazed, attribute this sorry state of affairs to a number of variables that Liberals agree with, mostly referring to a transition from a low-tech society to a high-tech society, from a manufacturing base to a financial base, from a hunting, farming and manufacturing economy to an information economy. None of this has any drawing power. But the neoliberal steady refrain, from Reagan’s Welfare Queen to Romney’s 47 percent, has seductive power with that pivotal, crucial, voting middle class. The seductive spin is well-known: "The slow degeneration of working-class family life and the creation of a ‘moocher’ class too lazy and indulged to get a job results from ‘big government’ nurturing and coddling." There is a seductiveness also to other neoliberal reasons as to why immiseration is like the wolf now at every door but those of an elite few. Each "reason" touches a hot spot already fully charged within us. The collapse of a "nuclear family" is the collapse of a patriarchal order that is itself an order preserving male desire. The bureaucracy of public education is no more than the resistance of what is public, governmental and socialist to personal choice and individual freedom. The power of unions resides in a communist-like solidarity that obstructs the free and competitive play of business.

To read more articles by Joseph Natoli and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

All of these briefs are seductive spins within the American cultural imaginary, not because they rest on uncontested fact and evidence, but because they rest on seductions and repressions already deeply embedded in that imaginary. In other words, the way we think now is so heavily layered in fantasies and illusions that the argument that wins the day does not appeal to rationality but rests on those fantasies and illusions. As I have suggested before, this imaginary and its accompanying fantasies and illusions are not partisan, there being no politics ruling imagination. But there is a political use of the imaginary, what I call the politics of seduction, and that arises from an economics of immiseration. There would be little need for the former if such an economics had not led, as it has, to immiseration for an increasing number and the anxieties that emerge from a fear of inevitable immiseration for many more. 

Every rule and restraint made on society’s behalf is never as real as our instinctual appetites and our personal will to power.

There are numerous varieties of seduction, from Eve’s in the garden to Baudrillard’s sense that we seduce by enacting a weakness that we see in ourselves as well as others. We all harbor a never-fulfilled appetite to eat the world whole, and we choose an individual freedom, a supremacy of self-interests and desires, that urges us, like Milton’s Satan, to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven. The fantasies of desire are Janus-faced – as are the illusions of power. They have their weaker side – an impotency of desire, a feckless command and a captured will. Romney’s 47 percent of the population would eat up the world if they could but are totally impotent and cannot do so. The totalizing power that the elite seek can never be blocked by the feckless command of unions. Big government is no more than a ridiculed domain of power, not our own, that presumes to rule us. The fantasy links to male desire and personal choice are too transparent to require exegesis.

Seductions work because the appeal is to what is in us, both the desires and the fears, and therefore connections are made and recognition ensures response. And while both appeal and recognition are felt, they are unthought and pre-discursive. We do not think what is unthinkable. We do not express what we fear to think. Nevertheless, power remains here. Eden’s garden is no more than a confinement we need to go beyond, explore what’s outside; God’s one law, call it regulation, blocks our libertine and liberty-seeking nature. We do not need to be tempted to bite the apple; as unthinkable as this may sound, we were made to bite it. And much more. We have an appetite to possess and not to share. All that we have never quells a desire to have yet more. Mutual sharing and aid has no seductive power in our elemental level of being – but domination does. All other species, according to Genesis, awaited Adam’s naming, their identity and place in the world forever held within the province of human need and desire. Global warming can be conquered just as we have conquered nature all along the way. Global ecology movements thus have little seductive attraction as the rational arguments, especially in regard to human-caused climate change, have not been able to deactivate the seductiveness of what is irrational.

The failure of "Just Say No" rests in this morality of discipline, which the gentrified are pleased to impose upon the immiserated, although not on themselves.

While we can recite all this as a reprehensible darkness relegated to Freud’s Id, it all yet remains the fire that drives us to compete, own and dominate. What most compels us is not what we legislate for a social good, or what disciplines and bounds our own will, but what gives these free rein, a "road of excess" that leads not to Blake’s "palace of wisdom" but to an oligarch’s domain. The power of seduction lies in appearing at barriers that we ourselves have built to restrain our own dark side. The 1956 film Forbidden Planet envisions an extinct race destroyed by their own great and final high-tech breakthrough: They can materialize their own will, including what the film calls "Monsters from the Id." Because our defenses against our own uncivilizing drives are never as real as our own desires, seductions have no difficulty in passing through. Every rule and restraint made on society’s behalf is never as real as our instinctual appetites and our personal will to power. This is the hidden truth of Thatcher’s assertion that "there is no such thing as society." Such an assertion means that an economics of immiseration and a politics of seduction now exists – openly ridiculing all civilizing attempts to restrain us from playing out at will our own dark imaginaries.

Capitalism gives us an economics of the Id, an economics that liberates every hidden energy, striving against any confinement, offering a gratification that grows because it is unfettered, releasing instinctual forces that drive competitiveness beyond what commands can organize. The failures of socialist economies lie in their reliance on what is disciplinary in the service of all, command economies that restrain and regulate the full licensing of the Id. In globalized competitive economics, such self-disciplining cannot stand against the full force of a capitalism of the Id. Socialist economics champion the Superego, to enlist another character from Freud, allied with a common and public good, with "One for All" and not "All for One" mentality, and thus has no seductive power. You have to work hard at distancing yourself from your basic instincts, your own will to power, in order to feel the attraction in an economics of the Superego. Immiseration finds no release in restraint. The failure of "Just Say No" rests in this morality of discipline, which the gentrified are pleased to impose upon the immiserated, although not on themselves.

Liberals join with neoliberals in pretending that the emperor is not naked, that an economic system that is nakedly exploitative, rapacious and stochastic is fully clothed in efficient rationality.

The capitalism of the Id inevitably shapes, as it has done, an economics of immiseration for all those ravaged by an economics of the ravenous, driven over and plowed under by the winners. We are on what is a democratic "level playing field" only in the eyes of those destined to be driven over and plowed under. A politics of seduction emerges as naturally from an economics of immiseration as a steam engine is equipped with a pressure release valve. Some have engaged our open-throttle economics with an equal amount of open-throttle energy or, to put it another way, have extended successfully their own uncontrolled instincts for power and ownership into an economic arena built on those instincts. What are not seductions from outside, but only already energies and appetites inside, now are externalized on the national and international stage. What was inside, as Goethe remarked, is outside.

Because the politics of seduction arises from our economics of immiseration, the two join forces to easily and instinctively create a climate of seduction that diverts critique and spins the immiserated into distracting fantasies and illusions. This is a much more sophisticated version of Roman bread and circuses but just as directly targeting what any moral review would call the weaker side of our natures. Had Louis XVI been a mere figure head, or a president democratically elected, in a capitalism of the Id and a politics of seduction, the pressure release of revolution and the vengeance of the Reign of Terror would have been tampered down daily by seductions and the fantasies and illusions they inspire.

Only a seductiveness that plays into such fantasies and illusions can make the neoliberal case against the poor, against wage earners, against a so-called "underclass" magnetically compelling. Liberals join with neoliberals in pretending that the emperor is not naked, that an economic system that is nakedly exploitative, rapacious and stochastic is fully clothed in efficient rationality. What we have is an economic system that makes the possession of wealth itself the medium of achieving wealth while at the same time making work and workers irrelevant to the country’s needs and aspirations. This is an economic system that puts wealth at the disposal of a few, compounds that wealth like a snowball rolling downhill and solidifies a class divide in which the possession of wealth is the price of membership. The sidling of liberals toward neoliberals in regard to the inviolability and venerability of market rule is simply a result of the sharing of good fortune and the subsequent sharing of lifestyles. Neither wealthy liberals nor wealthy neoliberals are positioned to undermine their good fortune by targeting for demolition – or even prosecution after "The Great Recession" – an economic system run by a financial sector brokering the rising returns of their stock portfolios.

Regardless of how winners of both political persuasions maintain and protect market rule, the pressure is building in the lives of about 80 percent of the US population. A number left astray on this stage in the United States are gathering in protests from the 1999 Seattle WTO protests to Occupy Wall Street. They threaten the order of inequality and an economics of immiseration. The coordinates of attack on unions are recognized in the 2011 Wisconsin protests while the Google bus protests in San Francisco put gentrification, a plutocratic and not egalitarian creation, in the sights of the "ungentrified." These scattered but continuing outbreaks are signals to an order established by Market Rule that there is limited release of such opposition in a politics either imposed or self-restraining. Hypocrisy is transparent in asking many to expect nothing and live with less when surrounded by those profiting from an economics that knows no restraint. The jobless are each day less likely to assume personal responsibility for being jobless. Those always on the edge of hunger or on the edge of sickness, or already over that edge, are each day less likely to assume personal responsibility for their hunger and their sickness.

The functional and successful release valve brought into play is a steady campaign of seductions distracting the immiserated from their misery, a steady campaign to repress former solvency, on the part of the middle class, and continuing hardship on the part of the underclass. According to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, market rule has set up a relentless disparity in wealth in which the owners of capital will expand their wealth while wages stagnate. The case made here is solid but not seductive. It implies that release could be organized democratically but what hope is there of that if we are already entrapped within fantasies and illusions that arrive already packaged to turn reality, even the most visible and defined, into even greater diverting seductions. What hope is there of that if we are already allied with such seductions, already self-seduced?

An End to Self-Deception and Self-Seduction?

"From now on your job is to be a distraction so people forget what the real problems are."
The Hunger Games

"The risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism."
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

In response to all aspects of immiseration, from impoverishment and ignorance to insecurity and servitude, and a real need of remedy, the self-seduced individual has only to personally choose and design his or her own resurrection.

The toughest trick in magic is to make the mark feel that he knows what he sees and sees all there is to know. Of course, the magician is in charge and sets the stage to make you know what he wants you to know, to make you see what he wants you to see. We are now unfortunately set up in the United States to believe we design the set of conditions we live within and that creation, change and consequences are subject to our choosing, are in short, within our own self-empowered control. Every incidence of hardship then is supposed to trigger this self-seduction. In response to all aspects of immiseration, from impoverishment and ignorance to insecurity and servitude, and a real need of remedy, the self-seduced individual has only to personally choose and design his or her own resurrection.

How long will such self-deception work before you realize that the world has no obligation to respond to your self-design?

This posture follows through on below-living-wage employment, unemployment, job loss, underwater mortgages, lack of health care because of lack of health insurance, credit card cancellations as well as the deterioration of family and neighborhood living because of such assaults on both material and psychological well-being. Any failure to choose and design one’s own resurrection is a failure in an Ayn Rand-type "will to win." And regardless of the circumstances of failure and loss, self-seduced individuals must acknowledge personal responsibility, thus absolving and disconnecting others and the arrangement of forces outside themselves from their immiseration. As long as you believe you are the final arbiter of what happens to you, you will neither seek to determine what conditions are actually forming the context of your immiseration nor will you act to change those conditions. Instead, you might make a public confession, which are very popular with politicians, celebrities, preachers, or march on Washington to ask forgiveness. One of the most encouraging aspects of Occupy Wall Street is that no one showed up on Wall Street to confess.

Our seductions are truly in the sacred horizon of appearances, as Baudrillard tells us. We need only extend this to what appears on a computer screen or a smartphone and thus multiply the conduits or transmitters of seduction, distraction and repression. What we now face is a supplementation in cyberspace of the classical seductions of self-seduction and scapegoat seduction. What cyberspace offers is an alternative reality that, unlike "real" reality, responds to self-design, thus enabling you to spin yourself into a realm of your own choices, never ending as long as your choices remain yours. Unless you choose what is counter to your preferences, what deconstructs your reasoning, what denies your fantasies and illusions, you will remain in this self-spin, one in which what you search for must adhere to the same preferences that initiated the search. What you do not choose therefore lies outside and is different from what you choose. Thus, the vicious circle that cyberspace offers, one that confirms self-seduction.

Nothing more clearly indicates the inhumanity engendered by our economics of inequality than a "reform" that increases the age of Social Security retirement measured not by the lifespan of the immiserated but by the lifespan of the gentrified.

If the self-seduced and self-designing lot went on TV’s Dr. Phil show, they would soon face the question "How’s that working for you?" How long will such self-deception work before you realize that the world has no obligation to respond to your self-design?

Self-seduction pre-empts the need for what Robert Reich calls an "Inequality for All" society to seduce and distract the have-nots and have-less-every-day and thus release a growing discontent that such inequality generates. The self-seduced are their own pressure release valves, or, more precisely, they continuously draw the pressure inward, back into themselves, and suffer the consequences, tragically ironic, personally. While the gentrified shape their lives toward healthful longevity, the immiserated consume their own health, physically and mentally. Their life spans grow shorter – but perhaps not before breakdowns leading to violence, crime and incarceration occur. Nothing more clearly indicates the inhumanity engendered by our economics of inequality than a "reform" that increases the age of Social Security retirement measured not by the lifespan of the immiserated but by the lifespan of the gentrified. What we have here is an offer to increase the age of Social Security entitlement made by those who statistics show will live to receive it but will not at any age need it. And the offer is made to those who statistics show will need such benefits but will not live to receive them. There is a heartless absurdity to this, a tragic irony.

The next-most-prevalent form of seduction is one in which the middle class, the class that votes and is therefore addressed in every election, sees the bottom 40 percent, the "underclass," as the cause of their own hardships.

Although self-seduction is a powerful seduction within the American cultural imaginary because it fits in nicely with the "super-memes" of individual freedom and personal choice, we are yet surrounded by supplemental forms of seduction, distraction and repression, available on an "as needed" basis. Although we delude ourselves that we are "the captains of our own fate" and so on and therefore positioned very far from attending to the "real conditions of the ground," the sheer number and types of hardships become hard to ignore. Such hardships are visited not only on the bottom "underclass" but a middle class living on the fumes of former middle-class contentment. These hardships are sufficient to cause even the most devout "navel gazer" to look up and see what’s going on. It is at this moment that the self-seduced cease to self-vent.

Where previously they chose to ignore "Obamacare" and, along with that, President Obama himself, they now question whether putting their wishes "out there" is enough to change things. People begin to wander outside their own minds and into the world. At whose doorstep can their troubles be laid? Perhaps at the doorstep of these new immigrants? Or the 47 percent "moocher" class who are too lazy to work? Or liberals who destroy individual incentive to compete and win? When the illusion that the immiseration of their own lives would be refreshed, rather like refreshing a computer screen by tapping F5, dissolves, what seductions, distractions and repressions fill the need to avoid cataclysmic explosion?

The next-most-prevalent form of seduction is one in which the middle class, the class that votes and is therefore addressed in every election, sees the bottom 40 percent, the "underclass," as the cause of their own hardships. Closely tied to this is idea that the federal government works hard to funnel middle-class tax money to the undeserving bottom 40 percent. Call this scapegoat seduction.

The intensity of seductions rises to the level of addictions.

Thus, the greatest victims of our society of inequality, those under the greatest economic pressures and therefore potentially the most explosive, become the enemy of those also under increasing economic pressure. If the two were to join forces, if the middle 40 percent who vote were to oppose and not abet seduction of the botttom 40 percent to vote, the outcome of all democratic elections would rebalance our inequality, most likely doing so by amending the economics of distribution. If the middle class were to lobby the federal government on behalf of the bottom 40 percent and stand behind all legislation seeking to redress their economic hardships and counter the devaluation of wages and wage earners, the rising pressure felt by both classes would be released, not deflected by seduction, distraction or repression.

Once again, any review of "the real conditions of the ground" would indicate that we are very far from these conditions ever being realized. The paths of distraction are many and increasing each day. The intensity of seductions rises to the level of addictions. And meanwhile what is really going on remains repressed as well as what memory and history would reveal to break the spell of such distractions and seductions. The mechanisms of release via seduction seem to be working – and sometimes so amazingly well, that it is possible to conceive of a future social "stability," call it a "new norm," a kind of chemical equilibrium in which all aspects of immiseration are displaced by all manner of distractions, seduction and repression.

All three mechanisms of release – seduction, distraction and repression – seem to be at work in fashioning an admiring and envious view of the Elite, the Winners, whom we are all always, in this seductive scenario, only a few steps from joining.

The Hunger Games depicts a future that is an amalgam of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The audience of these games is like spectators at the Roman gladiatorial games. It seems, however, that cyberspace soon will offer a virtualized reality for all, so that every individual engages in whatever virtualized distraction he or she chooses. Thusly, even the socialized aspect of seduction conflates to the private and personal. Self-seduction is facilitated in a way that the real world, "the great outdoors" of life outside oneself, surely would tamper with.

We may be transitioning to a future in which the exploited and victimized, the castoffs of market rule, live in a feudalist poverty that is etherized by virtualized escapes ready-to-hand. We seem to be moving more quickly into this scenario than one in which underclass, working class and middle class form an alliance. One would even have to ask "Against whom?" because all three mechanisms of release – seduction, distraction and repression – seem to be at work in fashioning an admiring and envious view of the elite, the winners, whom we are all always, in this seductive scenario, only a few steps from joining.

Interpreting a present situation, in this case, the economics of immiseration and the politics of seduction are neither presumptuous nor irrational. However, extending what seems evident now into a future that only a fool or a madman believes he sees turns interpretation into prophecy. Dismal prophecy is the worst, especially when the present is so full of variables, so interwoven with complexities and ambiguities that make every assertion indeterminate. Dark scenarios of the future sap the recuperative energy so needed at this moment. And yet ignoring the intensity of seduction now and the power of virtualized seductions of the future does more than sap our optimisim.

The impossibility of any seduction or repression remaining unchallenged or unexposed is cyberspace’s greatest power.

There is truly zilch that we can see of the future, but those who will be in that future are among us now. Neither the Millennials nor the cybertech world they clearly prefer to be in now make clear to us what they will become. On one hand, the "social" aspect of social networks is a mockery of inclusiveness as we orbit within the solar systems of our own like and dislikes. The public space collapses into a private space; society into solipsism. On the other hand, cyberspace networking can shape solidarity and activism. Every flash mob aroused for a lark can turn into smart mobs with serious political intent. And the headlines since the Arab Spring revolutions show us this can happen. And while NSA spying is made possible by cybertech, the secrecy of such can be leaked and made public instantaneously thanks to cybertech. In all this, the seductive power of cyberspace is countered by its own failure to serve any one oligarch, hedge fund or master builder. The impossibility of any seduction or repression remaining unchallenged or unexposed is cyberspace’s greatest power. And that is observable now.

Paul Taylor’s The Next America describes the Millennial generation as politically independent, more clearly understood I think as independence from political parties and the organization of doing politics in ways that ignore personal self-empowerment. There is a debit side to this, similar to cyberspace’s debit side. Everything about cyberspace and cellphone technology nurtures self-design and choice; a YOUniverse shaped by both is not only satisfying, marvelously absorbing and entertaining, but there seem to be no dire repercussions. High-tech literacy is set to make literacy itself obsolete as voice-activated systems leave the alphabet and the keyboard behind. The problem with alternative realities that enclose what we like and exclude what we do not like is that the real world comes knocking, "the world of hard knocks." Because we are clueless as to how things go on outside our own province, we are like the ineffectual Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, victims of the degenerate Moorlocks.

That is the downside. It is as impossible to rest on a downside with the Millennials as it is with cyberspace. The independence of Millennials means that all the mechanisms that keep the immiserated and powerless ineffectual in response to their own plight may lose hold. For instance, when history is a long scroll down Facebook, repression of historical memory is an empty exercise. When desires are fulfilled in cyberspace at will and a YOUniverse is already owned by you, what seductions can work if seduction itself is over with, superfluous? Consider also that if Thomas Pikkety is right and we are experiencing a relentless widening of wealth disparity, we can expect that the wealthier will grow wealthier while the Many will either become inured to their immiseration or distracted from it or retaliate. A Millennial of today immiserated in the future is a loose cannon with cybertech at his or her side. If cyberspace is a space where the imagination is exercised, those who possess such imagination can overwhelm what William Blake called "the Mill" where "Humanity shall be no more, but war & princedom & victory!" (Jerusalem, I:32).

Belief that any one person can accomplish anything and that one’s imagination cannot be bounded by any order of things is a powerful possession that may cause both the economics of immiseration and the politics of seduction more than a headache.

Joseph Natoli has published books and articles, on and off line, on literature and literary theory, philosophy, postmodernity, politics, education, psychology, cultural studies, popular culture, including film, TV, music, sports, and food and farming. His most recent book is Travels of a New Gulliver. You can follow his writing on twitter at Gulliver’s Takes and at www.josephnatoli.com.

Eric J. Hobsbawm is a well-known UK-based Marxist academic historian. This article is an adaptation of a chapter that was originally published in his book Revolutionaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).

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Cities and Insurrections

By Eric J. Hobsbawm

Whatever else a city may be, it is at the same time a place inhabited by a concentration of poor people and, in most cases, the locus of political power which affects their lives. Historically, one of the things city populations have done about this is to demonstrate, make riots or insurrections, or otherwise exert direct pressure on the authorities who happen to operate within their range. It does not much matter to the ordinary townsman that city power is sometimes only local, whereas at other times it may also be regional, national, or even global. However, it does affect the calculations both of the authorities and of political movements designed to overthrow governments, whether or not the cities are capitals (or what amounts to the same thing, independent city-states) or the headquarters of giant national or international corporations, for if they are, urban riots and insurrections can obviously have much wider implications than if the city authority is purely local.

The subject of this article is how the structure of cities has affected popular movements of this sort, and conversely, what effect the fear of such movements has had on urban structure. The first point is of much more general significance than the second. Popular riot, insurrection, or demonstration is an almost universal urban phenomenon, and as we now know, it occurs even today in the affluent megalopolis of the developed world. On the other hand the fear of such riot is intermittent. It may be taken for granted as a fact of urban existence, as in most pre-industrial cities, or as the kind of unrest which periodically flares up and subsides without producing any major effect on the structure of power. It may be underestimated, because there have not been any riots or insurrections for a long time, or because there are institutional alternatives to them, such as systems of local government by popular election. There are, after all, few continuously riotous cities. Even Palermo, which probably holds the European record with 12 insurrections between 1512 and 1866, has had very long periods when its populace was relatively quiet. On the other hand, once the authorities decide to alter the urban structure because of political nervousness, the results are likely to be substantial and lasting, like the boulevards of Paris.

The effectiveness of riot or insurrection depends on three aspects of urban structure: how easily the poor can be mobilized, how vulnerable the centers of authority are to them, and how easily they may be suppressed. These are determined partly by sociological, partly by urbanistic, partly by technological factors, though the three cannot always be kept apart. For instance, experience shows that among forms of urban transport, tramways, whether in Calcutta or Barcelona, are unusually convenient for rioters; partly because the raising of fares, which tends to affect all the poor simultaneously, is a very natural precipitant of trouble, partly because these large and track-bound vehicles, when burned or overturned, can block streets and disrupt traffic very easily. Buses do not seem to have played anything like as important a part in riots, underground railways appear to be entirely irrelevant to them (except for transporting rioters) and automobiles can at best be used as improvised road blocks or barricades, and, to judge by modern experience in Paris, not very effective ones. Here the difference is purely technological.

On the other hand, universities in the center of cities are evidently more dangerous centers of potential riot than universities on the outskirts of towns or behind some green belt, a fact which is well known to Latin American governments. Concentrations of the poor are more dangerous when they occur in or near city centers, like the 20th-century ethnic ghettos in many North American cities, than when they occur in some relatively remote suburb, as in 19th-century Vienna. Here the difference is urbanistic and depends on the size of the city and the pattern of functional specialization within it. However, a center of potential student unrest on the outskirts of town, like Nanterre in Paris, is nevertheless far more likely to create trouble in the central city than the Algerian shanty towns in the same suburb, because students are more mobile and their social universe is more metropolitan than immigrant laborers. Here the difference is primarily sociological.

Suppose, then, we construct the ideal city for riot and insurrection. What will it be like? It ought to be densely populated and not too large in area. Essentially it should still be possible to traverse it on foot, though greater experience of rioting in fully motorized societies might modify this judgment. It should perhaps not be divided by a large river, not only because bridges are easily held by the police, but also because it is a familiar fact of geography or social psychology that the two banks of a river look away from each other, as anyone living in south London or on the Paris left bank can verify.

Its poor ought to be relatively homogenous socially or racially, though of course we must remember that in pre-industrial cities or in the giant areas of under-employment in the developing world today, what at first sight looks like a very heterogeneous population may have a considerable unity, as witness such familiar terms in history as ‘the laboring poor’, ‘le menu peuple’, or ‘the mob’. It ought to be centripetal, that is to say, its various parts ought to be naturally oriented towards the central institutions of the city, the more centralized the better. The medieval city republic that was designed on a system of flows towards and away from the main assembly space, which might also be the main ritual center (cathedral), the main market, and the location of the government, was ideally suited to insurrection for this reason. The pattern of functional specialization and residential segregation ought to be fairly tight. Thus the pre-industrial pattern of suburbs, which was based on the exclusion from a sharply defined city of various undesirables — often necessary to city life — such as non-citizen immigrants, outcast occupations or groups, did not greatly disrupt the cohesion of the urban complex: Triana was entangled with Seville, as Shoreditch was with the City of London.

On the other hand the 19th-century pattern of suburbs, which surrounded an urban core with middle-class residential suburbs and industrial quarters, generally developing at opposite ends of town from one another, affects urban cohesion very substantially. ‘East End’ and ‘West End’ are both physically and spiritually remote from each other. Those who live west of the Concorde in Paris belong to a different world from those who live east of the Republique. To go a little farther out, the famous ‘red belt’ of working-class suburbs which surround Paris was politically significant, but had no discernible insurrectionary importance. It simply did not belong to Paris any longer, nor indeed did it form a whole, except for geographers.[1]

All these are considerations affecting the mobilization of the city poor, but not their political effectiveness. This naturally depends on the ease with which rioters and insurrectionaries can get close to the authorities, and how easily they can be dispersed. In the ideal insurrectionary city the authorities — the rich, the aristocracy, the government, or local administration — will therefore be as intermingled with the central concentration of the poor as possible. The French king will reside in the Palais Royal or Louvre and not at Versailles, the Austrian emperor in the Hofburg and not at Schoenbrunn. Preferably the authorities will be vulnerable. Rulers who brood over a hostile city from some isolated stronghold, like the fortress-prison of Montjuich over Barcelona, may intensify popular hostility, but are technically designed to withstand it. After all, the Bastille could almost certainly have held out if anyone in July 1789 had really thought that it would be attacked. Civic authorities are of course vulnerable almost by definition, since their political success depends on the belief that they represent the citizens and not some outside government or its agents. Hence perhaps the classical French tradition by which insurrectionaries make for the city hall rather than the royal or imperial palace and, as in 1848 and 1871, proclaim the provisional government there.

Local authorities therefore create relatively few problems for insurrectionaries (at least until they begin to practice urban planning). Of course, city development may shift the town hall from a central to a rather more remote location: nowadays it is a long way from the outer neighborhoods of Brooklyn to New York’s City Hall. On the other hand in capital cities the presence of governments, which tends to make riots effective, is offset by the special characteristics of towns in which princes or other self-important rulers are resident, and which have a built-in counter-insurgent bias. This arises both from the needs of state public relations and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of security.

Broadly speaking, in a civic town the role of the inhabitants in public activities is that of participants, in princely or government towns, of an admiring and applauding audience. The wide straight processional ways with their vistas of palace, cathedral, or government building, the vast square in front of the official facade, preferably with a suitable balcony from which the multitudes may be blessed or addressed, perhaps the parade ground or arena: these make up the ceremonial furniture of an imperial city. Since the Renaissance, major western capitals and residences have been constructed or modified accordingly. The greater the desire of the ruler to impress or the greater his folie de grandeur, the wider, straighter, more symmetrical his preferred layout. Few less suitable locations for spontaneous riot can be imagined than New Delhi, Washington, DC, Saint Petersburg, or for that matter, the Mall and Buckingham Palace in London. It is not merely the division between a popular east and middle-class and official west in Paris which has made the Champs Elysees the place where the official and military parade is held on July 14, whereas the unofficial mass demonstration belongs to the triangle Bastille-Republique-Nation.

Such ceremonial sites imply a certain separation between rulers and subjects, a confrontation between a remote and awful majesty and pomp on one side, and an applauding public on the other. It is the urban equivalent of the picture-frame stage; or better still, the opera, that characteristic invention of western absolute monarchy. Fortunately, for potential rioters, this is or was not the only relationship between rulers and subjects in capital cities. Often, indeed, it was the capital city itself which demonstrated the ruler’s greatness, while its inhabitants, including the poorest, enjoyed a modest share of the benefits of its majesty. Rulers and ruled lived in a sort of symbiosis. In such circumstances the great ceremonial routes led through the middle of the towns as in Edinburgh or Prague. Palaces had no need to cut themselves off from slums. The Vienna Hofburg, which presents a wide ceremonial space to the outside world, including the Viennese suburbs, has barely a yard or two of urban street or square between it and the older Inner City, to which it visibly belongs.

This kind of town, combining as it did the patterns of civic and princely cities, was a standing invitation to riot, for here palaces and town houses of great nobles, markets, cathedrals, public squares, and slums were intermingled, the rulers at the mercy of the mob. In time of trouble they could withdraw into their country residences, but that was all. Their only safeguard was to mobilize the respectable poor against the unrespectable after a successful insurrection, e.g. the artisans guilds against the ‘mob’, or the National Guard against the propertyless. Their one comfort was the knowledge that uncontrolled riot and insurrection rarely lasted long, and were even more rarely directed against the structure of established wealth and power. Still this was a substantial comfort. The King of Naples or the Duchess of Parma, not to mention the Pope, knew that if their subjects rioted, it was because they were unduly hungry and as a reminder to prince and nobility to do their duty, i.e. to provide enough food at fair prices on the market, enough jobs, handouts, and public entertainment for their excessively modest needs. Their loyalty and piety scarcely wavered, and indeed when they made genuine revolutions (as in Naples in 1799) they were more likely to be in defense of Church and King against foreigners and the godless middle classes.

Hence the crucial importance in the history of urban public order, of the French Revolution of 1789-99, which established the modern equation between insurrection and social revolution. Any government naturally prefers to avoid riot and insurrection, as it prefers to keep the murder rate down, but in the absence of genuine revolutionary danger the authorities are not likely to lose their cool about it. Eighteenth-century England was a notoriously riotous nation, with a notoriously sketchy apparatus for maintaining public order. Not only smaller cities like Liverpool and Newcastle, but large parts of London itself might be in the hands of the riotous populace for days on end. Since nothing was at stake in such disorders except a certain amount of property, which a wealthy country could well afford to replace, the general view among the upper classes was unconcerned, and even satisfied. Whig noblemen took pride in the state of liberty which deprived potential tyrants of the troops with which to suppress their subjects and the police with which to harry them. It was not until the French Revolution that a taste for multiplying barracks in towns developed, and not until the Radicals and Chartists of the first half of the 19th century that the virtues of a police force outweighed those of English freedom. (Since grass-roots democracy could not always be relied on, the Metropolitan Police was put directly under the Home Office in the national government, where it still remains.)

Indeed, three main administrative methods of countering riot and insurrection suggested themselves: systematic arrangements for deploying troops, the development of police forces (which barely existed in the modern form before the 19th century), and the rebuilding of cities in such ways as to minimize the chances of revolt. The first two of these had no major influence on the actual shape and structure of cities, though a study of the building and location of urban barracks in the 19th century might provide some interesting results, and so might a study of the distribution of police stations in urban neighborhoods. The third affected the townscape very fundamentally, as in Paris and Vienna, cities in which it is known that the needs of counterinsurgency influenced urban reconstruction after the 1848 revolutions. In Paris the main military aim of this reconstruction seems to have been to open wide and straight boulevards along which artillery could fire, and troops advance, while at the same time — presumably — breaking up the main concentrations of potential insurgents in the popular quarters. In Vienna the reconstruction took the form mainly of two wide concentric ring roads, the inner ring (broadened by a belt of open spaces, parks, and widely spaced public buildings) isolated the old city and palace from the (mainly middle-class) inner suburbs, the outer ring isolating both from the (increasingly working-class) outer suburbs.

Such reconstructions may or may not have made military sense. We do not know, since the kind of revolutions they were intended to dominate virtually died out in western Europe after 1848. (Still, it is a fact that the main centers of popular resistance and barricade fighting in the Paris Commune of 1871, Montmartre-northeast Paris and the Left Bank, were isolated from each other and the rest of the town.) However, they certainly affected the calculations of potential insurrectionaries. In the socialist discussions of the 1880s the consensus of the military experts among revolutionaries, led by Frederick Engels, was that the old type of uprising now stood little chance, though there was some argument among them about the value of new technological devices such as the then rapidly developing high explosives like dynamite. At all events, barricades which had dominated insurrectionary tactics from 1830 to 1871 (they had not been seriously used in the great French Revolution of 1789-99), were now less favored. Conversely, bombs of one kind or another became the favorite device of revolutionaries, though not marxist ones, and not for genuinely insurrectionary purposes.

Urban reconstruction, however, had another and probably unintended effect on potential rebellions, for the new and wide avenues provided an ideal location for what became an increasingly important aspect of popular movements, the mass demonstration, or rather procession. The more systematic these rings and cartwheels of boulevards, the more effectively isolated these were from the surrounding inhabited area, the easier it became to turn such assemblies into ritual marches rather than preliminaries to riot. London, which lacked them, has always had difficulty in avoiding incidental trouble during the concentration, or more usually the dispersal, of mass meetings held in Trafalgar Square. It is too near sensitive spots like Downing Street, or symbols of wealth and power like the Pall Mall clubs, whose windows the unemployed demonstrators smashed in the 1880s.

One can, of course, make too much of such primarily military factors in urban renewal. In any case they cannot be sharply distinguished from other changes in the 19th- and 20th-century city which sharply diminished its riot potential. Three of them are particularly relevant.

The first is sheer size, which reduces the city to an administrative abstraction, and a conglomerate of separate communities or districts. It became simply too big to riot as a unit. London, which until the 21st century still lacked so obvious a symbol of civic unity as the figure of a mayor, is an excellent example. It ceased to be a riotous city roughly between the time it grew from 1 million to 2 million inhabitants, i.e. in the first half of the 19th century. London Chartism, for instance, barely existed as a genuinely metropolitan phenomenon for more than a day or two on end. Its real strength lay in the ‘localities’ in which it was organized, i.e. in communities and neighborhoods like Lambeth, Woolwich, or Marylebone, whose relations with each other were at the most loosely federal. Similarly, the radicals and activists of the late 19th century were essentially locally based. Their most characteristic organization was the Metropolitan Radical Federation, essentially an alliance of working men’s clubs of purely local importance, in such neighborhoods as had a tradition of radicalism — Chelsea, Hackney, Clerkenwell, Woolwich. The familiar London tendency to build low, and therefore to sprawl, made distances between such centers of trouble too great for the spontaneous propagation of riots. How much contact would Battersea or Chelsea (then still a working-class area electing left-wing MPs) have with the turbulent East End of the 1889 dock striker? How much contact, for that matter, would there be between Whitechapel and Canning Town? In the nature of things the shapeless built-up areas which grew either out of the expansion of a big city or the merging of larger and smaller growing communities, and for which artificial names have had to be invented (‘conurbation’, ‘Greater’ London, Berlin, or Tokyo) were not towns in the old sense, even when administratively unified from time to time.

The second is the growing pattern of functional segregation in the 19th- and 20th-century city, that is to say, on the one hand, the development of specialized industrial, business, government, and other centers or open spaces, on the other, the geographical separation of classes. Here again London was the pioneer, being a combination of three separate units — the government center of Westminster, the merchant city of London, and the popular Southwark across the river. Up to a point the growth of this composite metropolis encouraged potential rioters. The northern and eastern edges of the City of London and Southwark where the merchant community bordered on districts of workers, artisans, and the port — all in their way equally disposed to riot, like the Spitalfield weavers or the Clerkenwell radicals — formed natural flash-points. These were the areas where several of the great 18th-century riots broke out. Westminster had its own population of artisans and miscellaneous poor, whom the proximity of king and Parliament and the accident of an unusually democratic franchise in this constituency, turned into a formidable pressure group for several decades of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The area between the City and Westminster, which was filled by an unusually dense accumulation of slums, inhabited by laborers, immigrants, and the socially marginal (Drury Lane, Covent Garden, St. Giles, Holborn), added to the ebullience of metropolitan public life.

However, as time went on the pattern simplified itself. The 19th-century City ceased to be residential, and became increasingly a pure business district, while the port moved downstream, the city middle and lower-middle classes into more or less remote suburbs, leaving the East End an increasingly homogeneous zone of the poor. The northern and western borders of Westminster became increasingly upper- and middle-class settlements largely designed as such by landowners and speculative builders, thus pressing the centers of artisans, laborers, and others inclined to radicalism and riot (Chelsea, Notting Hill, Paddington, Marylebone) on to a periphery increasingly remote from the rest of radical London. The slums between the two cities survived longest but by the early 20th century they had also been broken into small patches by the urban renewal which has given London some of its gloomiest thoroughfares (Shaftesbury Avenue, Roseberry Avenue) as well as some of its most pompous ones (Kingsway, Aldwych), and an impressive accumulation of barrack-like tenements purporting to increase the happiness of the Drury Lane and Saffron Hill proletariat. Covent Garden and Soho (which elected communist local councillors in 1945) are perhaps the last relic of old-fashioned metropolitan turbulence in the center of the town. By the late 19th century the potentially riotous London had already been broken up into peripheral segments of varying size (the huge and amorphous East End being the largest), surrounding a non-residential City and West End and a solid block of middle-class districts, and surrounded in turn by middle- and lower-middle-class outer suburbs.

Such patterns of segregation developed in most large and growing western cities from the early 19th century, though the parts of their historic centers which were not transformed into business or institutional districts, sometimes retained traces of their old structure, which may still be observed in the red-light quarters, as in Amsterdam. Twentieth-century working-class rehousing and planning for motor transport further disintegrated the city as a potential riot center. (The 19th-century planning for railways had, if anything, the opposite effect, often creating socially mixed and marginal quarters around the new terminals.) The recent tendency to shift major urban services such as central markets from the centers to the outskirts of cities will no doubt disintegrate it further.

Is the urban riot and insurrection therefore doomed to disappear? Evidently not, for we have in recent years seen a marked resurgence of this phenomenon in some of the most modern cities, though also a decline in some of the more traditional centers of such activities. The reasons are mainly social and political, but it may be worth looking briefly at the characteristics of modern urbanism which encourage it.

Modern mass transportation is one. Motor transport has so far contributed chiefly to the mobilization of that normally un-riotous group, the middle class, though such devices as the motorized demonstration (Frenchmen and Algerians still remember the massed horns of reaction hooting Al-ge-rie francaise) and that natural device of sabotage and passion, the traffic jam. However, cars have been used by activists in North American riots, and disrupt police action when on the move, while forming temporary barricades when stationary. Moreover, motor transport distributes the news of riots beyond the immediate area affected since both private cars and buses have to be extensively re-routed.

Public transport, and especially underground railways, which are once again being built in several big cities on a large scale, is more directly relevant. There is no better means of transport for moving large numbers of potential rioters rapidly over long distances than trains running at frequent intervals. This is one reason why the West Berlin students have been a rather effective body of rioters: the underground links the Free University set among the remote and spectacularly middle-class villas and gardens of Dahlem, with the town center.

More important than transport are two other factors: the increase in the number of buildings worth rioting against or occupying, and the development in their vicinity of accumulations of potential rioters. For while it is true that the headquarters of central and municipal government are increasingly remote from the riotous quarters, and the rich or noble rarely live in palaces in the town centers (apartments are both less vulnerable and more anonymous), sensitive institutions of other kinds have multiplied. There are the communications centers (telegraph, telephone, radio, television). The least experienced organizer of a military coup or insurrection knows all about their importance. There are the gigantic newspaper offices, fortunately so often concentrated in the older city centers, and providing admirable incidental material for barricades or cover against fire in the form of delivery trucks, newsprint, and packages of papers. They were used for street-fighting purposes as long ago as 1919 in Berlin, though not very much since. There are, as we all know now, the universities. Though the general tendency to move these out of city centers has diminished their riot potential somewhat, there are enough academic precincts left in the middle of big towns to satisfy the activists. Besides, the explosion of higher education has filled the average university to bursting point with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of marchers or fighters. There are, above all, the banks and large corporations, symbols and reality of the power structure, and increasingly concentrated in those massifs of plate glass and concrete by which the traveler recognizes the centers of a proper 21st-century city.

Theoretically these should be individually as much the object of attack by rioters as city halls or capitols, for IBM, Shell, or General Motors carry at least as much weight as most governments. Banks have long been aware of their vulnerability, and in some Latin countries — Spain is a good example — their combination of symbolic architectural opulence and heavy fortification provides the nearest thing to those town-citadels in which feudal and feuding noblemen barricaded themselves in the middle ages. To see them under heavy police guard in times of tension is an instructive experience, though, in fact, the only champions of direct action who have been systematically attracted by them are unpolitical robbers and revolutionary ‘expropriators’. But if we except such politically and economically negligible symbols of the American way of life as Hilton hotels, and the occasional object of specialized hostility such as Dow Chemical, riots have rarely aimed directly at any of the buildings of large corporations. Nor are they very vulnerable. It would take more than a few broken plate-glass windows or even the occupation of a few acres of office space, to disrupt the smooth operations of a modern oil company.

On the other hand, collectively ‘downtown’ is vulnerable. The disruption of traffic, the closing of banks, the office staffs who cannot or will not turn up for work, the businessmen marooned in hotels with overloaded switchboards, or who cannot reach their destinations: all these can interfere very seriously with the activities of a city. Indeed, this came close to happening during the 1967 riots in Detroit. What is more, in cities developing on the North American pattern it is not unlikely to happen, sooner or later. For it is well known that the central areas of town, and their immediate surroundings, are being filled with the minority poor as the comfortable whites move out. The ghettos lap round the city centers like dark and turbulent seas. It is this concentration of the most discontented and turbulent in the neighborhood of a relatively few unusually sensitive urban centers which gives the militants of a smallish minority the political importance which black riots would certainly not have if the 10 or 15% of the US population who are African-Americans were more evenly distributed throughout the whole of that vast and complex country.

Still, even this revival of rioting in western cities is comparatively modest. An intelligent and cynical police chief would probably regard all the troubles in western cities during recent years as minor disturbances, magnified by the hesitation or incompetence of the authorities and the effect of excessive publicity. With the exception of the Latin Quarter riots of May 1968 in Paris, none of them looked as though they could, or were intended to, shake governments. Anyone who wishes to judge what a genuine old-style insurrection of the urban poor, or a serious armed rising, is and can achieve, must still go to the cities of the developing world: to Naples which rose against the Germans in 1943, to the Algerian Casbah in 1956 (excellent movies have been made about both these insurrections), to Bogota in 1948, perhaps to Caracas, certainly to Santo Domingo in 1965.

The effectiveness of recent western city riots is due not so much to the actual activities of the rioters, as to their political context. In the ghettos of the United States they have demonstrated that black people are no longer prepared to accept their fate passively, and in doing so they have doubtless accelerated the development of black political consciousness and white fear; but they have never looked like a serious immediate threat to even the local power structure. In Paris they demonstrated the instability of an apparently firm and monolithic regime. (The actual fighting capacity of the insurrectionaries was never in fact tested, though their heroism is not in question: no more than two or three people were killed, and those almost certainly by accident.) Elsewhere the demonstrations and riots of students, though very effective inside the universities, have been little more than a routine police problem outside them.

But this, of course may be true of all urban riots, which is why the study of their relation to different types of towns is a comparatively unimportant exercise. Georgian Dublin does not lend itself easily to insurrection, and its population, which does, has not shown a great inclination to initiate or even to participate in uprisings. The Easter Rising took place there because it was a capital city, where the major national decisions are supposed to be made, and though it failed fairly quickly, it played an important part in the winning of Irish independence, because the nature of the Irish situation in 1917-21 allowed it to. Saint Petersburg, built from scratch on a gigantic and geometrical plan, is singularly ill-suited to barricades or street fighting, but the Russian revolution began and succeeded there. Conversely, the proverbial turbulence of Barcelona, the older parts of which are almost ideally suited to riot, rarely even looked like producing revolution. Catalan anarchism, with all its bomb throwers, pistoleros, and enthusiasm for direct action, was until 1936 never more than a normal problem of public order to the authorities, so modest that the historian is amazed to find how few policemen were actually supposed (rather inefficiently) to ensure its protection.

Revolutions arise out of political situations, not because some cities are structurally suited to insurrection. Still, an urban riot or spontaneous uprising may be the starter which sets the engine of revolution going. That starter is more likely to function in cities which encourage or facilitate insurrection. A friend of mine, who happened to have commanded the 1944 insurrection against the Germans in the Latin Quarter of Paris, walked through the area on the morning after the Night of the Barricades in 1968, touched and moved to see that young adults who had not been born in 1944 had built several of their barricades in the same places as then. Or, the historian might add, the same places that had seen barricades in 1830, 1848, and 1871. It is not every city that lends itself so naturally to this exercise, or where, consequently, each generation of rebels remembers or rediscovers the battlefields of its predecessors. Thus in May 1968 the most serious confrontation occurred across the barricades of the Rue Gay Lussac and behind the Rue Soufflot. Almost a century earlier, in the Commune of 1871, the heroic Raoul Rigault who commanded the barricades in that very area, was taken — in the same month of May — and killed by the Versaillais. Not every city is like Paris. Its peculiarity may no longer be enough to revolutionize France, but the tradition and the environment are still strong enough to precipitate the nearest thing to a revolution in a developed western country.
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NOTES
[1] How far such working-class suburbs can be separated from the central city area and still remain a direct factor in insurrections is an interesting question. Sans in Barcelona, the great bastion of anarchism, played no important part in the revolution of 1936, while Floridsdorf in Vienna, an equally solid bastion of socialism, could do little more than hold out in isolation